Tile Remember You
I’ve been stewing in my programming challenge, collecting tidbits of clues everywhere I can find them. I read my PHP books, check out code from several developer forums, continue to consult books like “Designing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen, and “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, and I’ve made some changes in the original math I worked out before.
I created this image in Photoshop to demonstrate how I’d like to see the user interface.
There would be 3 rows of six tiles each, with a simple menu bar along the top, and the info would pop up in its own window, off to the left, and with a drop-shadow; and the actual-size image with its name, dimensions and filesize, below it.
Transparent GIFs would have the background color selector to their advantage. When you mouse over the little color square, a 216-color (web-safe) palette would pop up and allow you to select one of the colors there. Of course, JPEGs don’t have transparency, so they won’t let the background through, but Portable Network Graphics (PNGs) do, and they’re useful for doing on-the-fly image editing too. This means I should be able to make those drop shadows and inner shadows right along with the building of the rest of the page.
When you mouse over the thumbnail — which is a tiled, then reduced, version of the actual image — the background of the page gets tiled with that tile, and the pop-up shows all the info, as I mentioned before. When you click on the thumbnail, the background and info box will “stick”, but the table with all the other tiles on it will hide; until you click once again, (anywhere on the page.)
That’s really all we need. I think those things are manageable. I think it’s still a very simple challenge. I’m designing it to be simple. I don’t want to tackle too much. So now that I know the behavior of the application, or rather, now that I’ve decided humans might like using this application in this proposed manner, I’m set to gather the tools I need to build it.
I now know there will be a good amount of CSS, and I believe CSS can be made to simulate drop shadows and inner shadows too, so that will be something I look further into. I have Fireworks on my computer, so working with PNGs is possible, but I’m not real familiar with it.
I will have to figure out a piece of code that allows color selection from a palette, similar to the way most graphics applications do it. I imagine there are open source PHP forums where usable code such as this resides.
“I don’t imagine anyone’s interested in this, Mitch”, he said.
And he was right.
