Hey, I'm trying to make a web app that allows users to write on a virtual drawing pad and record their drawings as the progress as a video. I know there's screen casting software out there, in fact, I have such software on my computer but I'm trying to create this ability online. Would anyone be able to suggest where I should start looking so that I could figure out how to do this?
I have pretty good programming skills with in flash and I'm good with php.
Thanks,
Mike
You might look into internet whiteboard software, like this one. A company called GroupBoard offers this as a service, including free offerings. Their stuff isn't great, but they're one of the only companies who offer it without requiring use of a browser plugin.
The link I provided contains tutorials for creating a whiteboard using AJAX alone.
You might want to try this product which allows you to record a collaborative whiteboard session, and optionally have it automatically uploaded to Vimeo. It can be embedded on your website.
Related
Recently I've read a number of articles talking about the idea of using "feature toggles" or "gatekeepers" to keep features hidden from users until the development is done. Facebook and Flickr both also talk about how they use this to test new features with a subset of users before unleashing them on everyone.
A bit of googling didn't turn up any existing PHP packages/tools that can be added to a web app to handle this type of thing. It seems straight forward enough to roll our own but no reason to re-invent that wheel if we don't need to. Are there any existing PHP tools to do this?
Articles
Feature Toggle by Martin Fowler
Flipping Out on Flickr DevBlog
Clarification: The part of this that I'm looking to see if it exists is the admin panel that controls which users can see the new features. In Flickr's example, they can turn it on based on the host. In the Facebook example, they add functionality such as limiting a feature to 5% of users, only TechCrunch users or only East coast users.
The admin panel seems crucial when you have 200 turned on features, 10 features that aren't quite done yet and 3 more that you're demoing for some users.
if (user_can_see_app()) {
show_app();
} else {
dont_show_app();
}
I fail to see why a package would be required for something so simple.
I've wrote a micro service for feature toggle pattern, called Bipolar:
https://marinho.github.io/bipolar-server
It is written in Python but that doesn't matter because it is an external API and Admin interface, so, all you need is to write a PHP client for it. We have used it in production for a while but only worked on public release and documentation recently. For JavaScript support it can push notifications using Webhooks as a basic URL call or via Pusher event.
I am bit missed after many years with no contact with PHP, but I can help you to write the client if you are interested.
I hope that can be helpful.
The easiest solution i found is to have the feature toggle state stored in some remote location that can change easily (turn it on/off)
I found it easy to have on GitHub a repo holding some JSON data with the feature toggle's state, later on you can change that state on GitHub (from phone/pc etc...)
your php code needs to fetch the JSON and make a decision from it ...
you can look at the blog post about how to achieve this:
http://www.nimrodstech.com/dead-simple-feature-toggle/
it shows a code snippet of how to achieve this in a simple way.
I have a client who wants me to implement the Grooveshark API into his site to be used as a fully fledged music system. It will be able to play, pause and skip songs from playlists that the user creates and and tracks the user favourites. So the user will have the ability to search for a track, add to playlist, favourite, play and the reverse of all these actions.
My question is. How do I get started. So I have the API (well the public version http://www.apishark.com as I am waiting for the full version to be sent to me). I look at the API and I just see what appears to me to be short snippets of code.
Is there some kind of a default way to implement an API, what do I need to know, how do I go about this task?
Any help will be appreciated.
Here you can find a php class to ease your work. It's not free but it's extremely cheap, and if you are not able to sort our how to use a standard REST api, and you have to do this for a work, maybe it's worth the price.
Or you can try here for a free class, but I never tried it and you have to use git to download the last version. I believe it's still under development, though.
Or, here you find a free python script that maybe it's easy to convert in PHP. Same here for a perl module.
I am going to be creating a website which will require up-to-date prices on certain iPhone apps, which I know is possible because the website AppShopper does just that except they do it with every website. I am not that skilled using PHP though I am a quick learner.
I think that I will need to create a spider/scraper that takes the values from the website though I have done lots of research and I haven't figured it out, though I this may not be what I need. I am not familiar with the creation of spiders, though I am willing to learn. This will not be the key-point of the site so it doesn't need to be the most robust system, I would just like to be able to have it updated the prices
I would appreciate any help or suggestions that anyone has to offer.
There is an official Search API provided by Apple. I haven't used it myself, but it's worth looking into. Read more here.
Last summer I learned HTML and CSS for a job, mainly through tutorials and a sort of "build this" method, that is, I'm given a goal and have to try to figure out how to build it myself.
Is there a place with some examples to teach someone with this method? My boss wants to get me going on PHP this summer, and I need to refamiliarize myself with it over the next week. Most people send me to Php.net to follow the documentation, is there another good method out there?
There is probably not a source online that lists projects that intersect with both your knowledge/ability and scope of interests.
I had success by implementing personal challenges based on stuff I wanted to do. Here are my examples:
A simple Twitter client (one text box, submits text to my Twitter account
Skills Learned : API's, cURL, webforms
A Facebook application that transferred your tweets to your Facebook stream (and filtered some)
Skills Learned : APIs, MySQL best practices (to store preferences), basic UI concerns, scheduled jobs (cron jobs), keeping a public timeline and estimation
A contest application that accepted user inputs and made a bracket that ran itself
Skills Learned : How to deal with user inputs from the web (scary!), accepting file uploads, image manipulation, user accounts (one vote per person), and how to make your own CMS/Backend for a webapp (I managed the whole contest from a panel I built for the backend)
The most valuable thing you can do is get a cheap webserver/MAMP/XAMP and just play. If you really enjoy the internet and programming, you'll come up with little tasks to try out all the time. Start whipping them up!
If you do the same thing over and over again, make your own library. Learn to include it in each project so you're not starting at scratch each time. Fail a little. Fail big!
well for my case i started my php learning (years ago) by a some basic built this systems,
start with:
guess Book
poll
news system
statistics script (how many visites per page, visitors by country,browser detection..etc)
board
CMS (content management systems)
if you understand french i can recommend a website where you can learn the basics and even more of php and mysql http://www.siteduzero.com/
good luck
PS: it's not that hard
My first real project (well, real indicating that I actually got paid to do it) was a very complex control panel for a large web hosting company. There were literally dozens of other control systems that needed to be consolidated into one 'intuitive' app. This included:
Network Monitors
Provisioning system / server control system
Support / Ticket system
Billing system
CRM
Webmail / Presence
Live chat (employee -> customer or employee -> employee)
Tie in with third party apps, like FreePBX
It had to be the most challenging assignment I have ever taken and actually completed. You can imagine how difficult it was to present a 'clean' user interface, given all of that functionality. Various components had to be able to talk to a central notification service.. E.g if you were in the network monitor, you'd be alerted that 3 new support tickets were waiting for you.
I'm not saying you should build something that elaborate, but building a control panel of some kind really helps you to learn how to avoid feature creep and teaches you how to conceptualize the end result at the beginning of the project. You'll end up with a lot of code that you can use on 'real' projects in the future, lots of experience with tools like Jquery and a firm grasp on how to build a good interface.
Invent (or think of) an industrial problem, then solve it. Acme Widgets needs your help! Control some motors, monitor some conveyors, graph supply and demand. Or, well, at least write code that could do it :) Then shrink it down into a mobile version.
I have a friend who is need of a web page. He does interior construction, and would like to have a gallery of his work. I'll probably go for a php host, and was thinking about the best way to implement the image gallery for him. I came up with:
Use flickr to host the images. They can be tagged, added to sets, and I can use both the tag and set information to display "categories" for the gallery, as well as browsing. Flickr also has multi-upload tools so that a 20 photo job won't be a PITA to upload.
How to best get at the api? Is there a good PHP library for flickr integration? Should I roll my own?
API key - is this considered a commercial project? The web page is for his business, and he will be paying me to create the site...
Is flickr the wrong tool for the job? It seems like a pretty good solution in my head, but is there something I'm missing? I haven't used their APIs at all.
Thanks for any input!
It sounds like a difficult way to do things - have you considered Gallery (No points on creativity for the name!).
Unless you're really wanting to save on bandwidth, I think you'd get much better results from installing some pre-built gallery.
The perfect solution for this kind of thing is Picasa (from Google ofcourse)
You get:
1gb of free storage space on a Google Picasaweb account that already has a web interface with embeddable slideshows and stuff
A compete image browse and upoad program for the client side (namely Picasa) that's directly connected to the web albums. It's so user friendly that even your grandma can put her pictures online with that.
RSS feeds and an API from google.
there's a custom light-weight PHP api available
Need anyting else?
Note from Chris to others that may be looking for an answer: The API can be found here.
I recently implemented a Flickr-based photo gallery for a client. Flickr was perfect for them for a lot of reasons. Gallery is an impressive open-source project, but its feature set (and complexity of administration) was overkill for what this client needed.
Check out the Flickr API, especially the section on building URLs, which will be necessary when building your web pages. Don't bother coding a PHP wrapper for the API's. phpFlickr has already done it, and it's a smart implementation.
Here's a helper function I wrote that made life a lot easier for the various pages that need to access Flicker:
function newFlickr()
{
static $flickr = NULL;
if($flickr != NULL)
{
return $flickr;
}
$flickr = new phpFlickr(api-key, secret);
$flickr->setToken(token);
$flickr->enableCache("db", "mysql://acct:pass#localhost/flickrcache");
return $flickr;
}
The trick here is that all the crud you need to enter is stored in a central place in your code. Caching is key, so use it. And, if you need a phpFlickr object in multiple places for each request, you're only ctor'ing it once, which saves on init time.
Having Read SchizoDuckie's post, I had a look at the picasa api for php, and found it a bit daunting to start with, however I found this sample code absolutely brilliant for getting started with some basic integration.
Samples for other languages also seem to be available - can't vouch for their usefullness, but suspect they will be good too.
These might be of help. They are mootools scripts and run without any server-side coding necessary. Both integrate with Flickr.
http://imago.codeboje.de/
http://www.moopix.org/
If you have any interest in Ruby on Rails, there is a screencast here that shows how to create a site similar to what you are describing in RoR.