Not a crazy busy week, but still some good progress made on a few items.  We started the week at rev 162 and right now we’re at rev 179.  I spent of bunch of the beginning of the week working on some non-SMS stuff, specifically a new skin for my own sim.  After I made some headway with that, I turned my attention to SMS.  One of the biggest tasks for SMS3 is building out the new database schema.  I spent a few hours working on that and my more hours will come yet.  On Tuesday, I replaced the Facebook-style modal window with one that looks like one of Apple’s HUD windows.  I decided that those things needed to stay global instead of being brought into the skins.  It’d just create too many problems otherwise.  I’ve also been playing around with new header images for the refreshed default interface.  Nothing crazy, just some clean up.  Finally, there was some more clean up work done with HUD windows yesterday to fix a few bugs and make the transparency a little less annoying.

The biggest thing checked in this week was the new manifest stuff.  Gone are the 2 manifest pages, instead replaced with one that uses a lot of jQuery to make the entire manifest (and a few other views of it) accessible instantly when a link is clicked.  Along with that, some of the globals code had to change to give admins more flexibility in determining what they see by default.  Of course, the update page and installation files had to be changed as well.  I also took some time to tweak the update page to separate what’s happening a bit more and provide some more comments for anyone looking at the page.  Finally, I took some time to clean up the directories a bit.  There was a lot of old files hanging around from my first crack at Neptune.  There was also a multi-purpose dev folder that got backed up and blown away.

No plans to work on 2.6 tomorrow as I’ll be hosting some people for the day, but next week should see me able to get back on my normal 8-12 hours of work again and keep pushing us toward the first beta of 2.6 in the next couple of months.  Until next time.

I realize this isn’t something I normally do, but I had an idea that I’ve started sorting through of late and I wanted to put it out there as I’m working on it.  Here it goes.

With the advent of jQuery in SMS, we’ve got a pretty powerful DOM manipulation tool at our fingertips that could allow for some very cool things.  How cool you ask?  What if we only had to use one manifest page?  What if we leveraged the power of jQuery to make the results on the manifest near instantaneous?  Still not following?  As it stands now, we have the manifest page with a few links at the top where you can jump to the departed crew, open positions and NPCs.  That’s all well and good, but what if we put everything on the page at once?  Yes, there might be a little more processing time, but in the end, I think the benefits outweight that.  Those links at the top would stay there, but instead of reloading the page, the sorting would happen instantly.  Want to just see the NPCs?  Click the link and in moments, everything else is gone except for the NPCs.  Want to jump over and see the playing characters?  Click the link and suddenly, the NPCs are gone, replaced instantly by the playing characters.  Far fetched?  Not as far as you might think.

The challenge right now is building a query that will give us everything we need … specifically, open positions right in with positions.  Yes, we’re doing that on the full manifest page, but not very well, so I’d like to find another way.  In the end though, if this works out, it’ll just be another way to put the information people want at their fingertips that much faster.