All entries for December 2007
December 06, 2007
Prototype for first increment released.
Okay, so it's been a while since the last post. That's mainly because I've been working on the project! Term finishes in a few days, the progress report has been handed in, and the first increment is on its way to completion.
The progress report cannot be posted online until well after the deadline, so if you wanted to read that, you'll have to wait. It's not Christmas just yet ;)
But the prototype is here and waiting for you. Please be aware that at this stage, the chords & lyrics are not formatted as required. I have spent a while trying to display them like this. If anyone out there can recommend a way of displaying HTML that gets 'correctly' formatted with CSS (at the moment, the JEditorPane does not support the CSS code that I need it to), please do! I have looked around, but nothing could be found in a reasonable amount of time that would work and be platform-independant. This will be revisited, but as with much of this project, the priorities must be kept in order, so rather than getting stuck in details, I shall be focussing on the larger issue of the database functionality. Talking of which, the add/remove/edit song buttons on the prototype's menu do not yet work. Please remember it is only a prototype!
So here it is, Merry Christmas!: Prototype (ZIP, ~100kb)
To run this, unzip all contents, and run the XMLGUI.jar file. Do this either by double-clicking it in windows explorer, or at a command line (in the same directory as the file), type 'java -jar XMLGUI.jar' and press enter. (It should work in Linux by the way, it was tested briefly on a DCS machine).
To get the program to do something useful, click File > Load Songs on the menu, and navigate to the folder that you placed the contents of the zip file into. Choose the songs-nocopyright.xml file, and voilá, a small selection of songs is displayed. Click them, search them etc. Please note that the search function can match some songs incorrectly due to the search algorithm implementation for this prototype.
If you don't want to download it to have a look, heres a peek: