Do you like to think about things? Me too.

I also like to visualize those things I think about. Usually these things are for web projects that I am developing.

It is very useful to "chart" and "flowchart" my program workflows or even mockup the interfaces even before programming - guess some of that software development mumbo jumbo sunk in.

A website that I came across last week has several templates for thinking guides or mind maps.

Exploratree, by FutureLab, is a free library of thinking guides. You can even create your own and submit it to other users. Very cool.

Here's a link to their video tutorial (this might help you grasp the concept).

This has been my first full week back to work, and I once again I am quickly learning new things. The week began with working on using different types of accounts to sign in to our backchannel app. So far we've implemented logins using Only1, ASP Membership accounts, Google account, and Facebook authentication. One thing I've learned is that the Facebook API is very tricky to use. They actually have quite a few different APIs that are slowly being either updated or deprecated, and there's not much documentation given with them.

I've also started going with more of an object-oriented route in my programming; designing classes and such instead of just coding the same methods over and over again...yeah, I can sometimes be a dirty programmer. I've found that not only is it a lot easier to go about programming this way, but it also just feels more professional. I hope to go about being more clean on this project the rest of the summer...no promises though. 

More improvements on the Backchannel App this week! One that I especially like is the addition of responsive web design. Its more than just a web design principle with a fancy name. What responsive web design means is that the App will be displayed differently depending on the size of the area its being viewed in. For example, if it is being viewed on a laptop it will show the full app, but if an iPhone is the device being used a more mobile friendly version will be displayed. The app will have 3 styles: Desktop, iPad, and iPhone.

Its interesting to see how this works. If tech-talk frightens you just skip down to the next paragraph. All of the styling is still in primarilly one stylesheet (other stylesheets are for plugins and such). Responsive web design uses media queries in the CSS to establish parameters for when certain CSS rules should be applied. These queries are related to screen resolution which allows us to target the different mobile devices and style accordingly.

This part of the Backchannel App has been fun for me. When I first heard we would be implementing responsive web design I thought it would be very complicated. Instead, its been suprising to see what all can be done in less than 100 lines of CSS.

FHU Connect received a few upgrades this past week. We have expanded a few ideas from our iPhone App development and have implemented a full "social stream" of all of our sites, not just Twitter. Now, FHU Connect contains content from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, our Athletics website, FHU Press Releases and our Blogs.

In addition, we've upgraded our 'new posts' notification to have a sleek new look:

It is important to us that our campus community has a way to stay connected with FHU.

While our backchannel app is not meant to be competition for Google Wave (R.I.P.), we do think it has some features that it would have been nice to see in Google Wave. I guess its too late for that though.

Recently we added some pretty sweet enhancements to the backchannel app. We are excited to see this app coming together.

First is the drag-n-drop file upload component. As you are using this app, you may have a need to share a file with your classmates. It may be a diagram or a chart, or even a study guide you have so graciously compiled and decided to bestow upon your classmates. Whatever it may be, sharing it is easy.

Instead of having to browse around from a file upload dialog, you can just click and drag from Finder or Explorer and then drop the file inside your browser in the area where you would enter whatever you want to say. Automagical.

Our backchannel app is built around the modules it has, which are the individual components in the app. To alternate between these modules, we implemented a pretty slick slider that will allow the students to use different modules in a seamless fashion. An image corresponding with each module will be in a sliding menu that you can easily navigate with.

We want the backchannel app to be as user friendly as possible, and making file sharing and navigation simple with components like these will help to do exactly that.