Web Design Forum: ashley_90 - Viewing Profile - Web Design Forum

Hi all,

Recently I've been designing the interface for a mobile app, and due to it being the first mobile app I've designed for, I found myself wondering what the best way to approach it would be.

I started off by downloading the iPhone GUI Kit from Teehan+Lax (http://www.teehanlax...-psd-iphone-4s/) which proved very useful when getting started, and I pretty much build a template to work with based on this.

What I started contemplating, was whether designing an interface based on the iPhone 4, would work well for other devices (Android, Blackberry etc) with different screen resolutions, and also whether it was worth designing a separate view for the landscape iPhone 4.

Another confusion - if I design for the iPhone 4's screen resolution in Photoshop, what happens to the quality of my graphic images on a higher resolution device?

So, I'd be really interested to hear about your experiences designing mobile interfaces, and how you handle designing an interface for a device which could come in a variety of resolutions...

Hi all,

Fairly straight-forward question really. I've outsourced a lot of work to Web Developers recently and it's always gone through my mind "what if I had a disagreement and things got out of hand"?

I'm wondering whether there is any advise or good practice when giving freelance Web developers access to your site's FTP and/or Wordpress login details?

At the moment I simply create an account for them, and specify the directory for that FTP account, which I assume restricts that FTP user to accessing that folder only? I obviously backup the site before handing it over too, but I just wondered whether this prevents them from attacking my site should there be an argument?

Cheers,

Ash

[RESOLVED - I was a conflict issue with Wordpress, thanks anyway!]

Hi everyone,

I have a little problem with my portfolio site at the moment. Since yesterday all of my JQuery scripts seem to have broken. I have quite a few different scripts on my site (which is powered by Wordpress) and I know that Wordpress is known to have some issues with Jquery, but it was working fine yesterday.

I made quite a few changes and I suspect that it is something I have changed in one of the scripts.

The url is ashleymosuro[dot][com]

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I've run out of ideas now...

Thanks,

Ash

Hi guys,

I'm about to take on quite a big project for a client who requires all sorts of Web-related work, but within this he needs an interactive map.

The map

Basically he is going to obtain the floor plans of a large campus and get a freelancer to design a huge map based on the floor plans. Once I eventually get my hands on the digital version of the map, which will probably come in the form of a PSD/AI or even a jpeg, I will need to incorporate it onto the Web site.

The functionality

In terms of interactivity, the user needs to be able to zoom in and out of the map. There is no other extra functionality apart from that, so I'm hoping that this is quite straight-forward. However, I will also be building a search engine for the client in which users will be able to search for certain keywords. The search results displayed will be links to different hotspots on the map, which I'm guessing I would create an image map for?

The problem

Databases and back-end code is not really what I do, however, I have done a lot of back-end coding and like to take on a challenge, as I'm sure I will eventually be able to achieve what I intend.

So where I'm stuck is just how exactly I will approach this interactive map. It seems that building the map and its interactivity shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm not entirely sure how I can build it in a way for each of these hotspots to be found using a search-engine. I assume that in the database I will obviously have all of my possible keywords (so the different room numbers/names) and then in each keyword's row there will be a field with a url to the page displaying the map with the relevant hotspot displaying. The question is how I tell it to display specific hotspots depending on the URL, and not just display ALL of the hotspots.

An example may make things easier to understand:

- User searches utilities room
- In the database the search engine searches for keywords matching 'utilities'
- In the same row as the keyword 'utilities' there is a URL
- So when presented with the search results, the user is shown this URL
- User clicks URL and is taken to the page displaying the interactive map
- On the interactive map there is one hotspot showing them where the utilities room is

The other challenge is making this whole idea usable on the mobile Web, as this is a very important feature.

But some advice would be great, as I've not really dived into this area before..

Cheers,

Ash

Hi everyone,

Seem to be having a problem getting this simple search engine to work correctly, because everytime I search for 'ash' it does not find any results, despite the fact that I have created a 'firstname' field of 'ash'.

Here's the code, to make things easier to understand:

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-
8859-1" />

<title>MySQL-based Search Engine</title>

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />

</head>

<body>

<h1>Search Engine</h1>

<div class="maincontainer">

<form method="get" action="processform.php">

<input type="text" name="searchterm" title="Enter your search
term here" value="Enter your search term here"
class="searchbox" />

<input type="submit" name="search" title="Search Now!
"value="Search" class="searchbutton" />

</form>

</div>

</body>

</html>

PHP file (mysql.php)

<?php

// define 'MySQL' class

class MySQL{

private $conId;

private $host;

private $user;

private $password;

private $database;

private $result;

const OPTIONS=4;

public function __construct($options=array()){

if(count($options)!=self::OPTIONS){

throw new Exception('Invalid number of connection parameters');

}

foreach($options as $parameter=>$value){

if(!$value){

throw new Exception('Invalid parameter '.$parameter);

}

$this->{$parameter}=$value;

}

$this->connectDB();

}

// connect to MySQL

private function connectDB(){

if(!$this->conId=mysql_connect($this->host,$this->user,$this->password)){


throw new Exception('Error connecting to the server');

}

if(!mysql_select_db($this->database,$this->conId)){

throw new Exception('Error selecting database');

}

}

// run query

public function query($query){

if(!$this->result=mysql_query($query,$this->conId)){

throw new Exception('Error performing query ['.$query.'] Error:['.mysql_error().']');

}

return new Result($this,$this->result);

}

public function escapeString($value){

return mysql_escape_string($value);

}

}

// define 'Result' class

class Result {

private $mysql;

private $result;

public function __construct(&$mysql,$result){

$this->mysql=&$mysql;

$this->result=$result;

}

// fetch row

public function fetchRow(){

return mysql_fetch_assoc($this->result);

}

// count rows

public function countRows(){

if(!$rows=mysql_num_rows($this->result)){

return false;

}

return $rows;

}

// count affected rows

public function countAffectedRows(){

if(!$rows=mysql_affected_rows($this->mysql->conId)){

throw new Exception('Error counting affected rows');

}

return $rows;

}

// get ID form last-inserted row

public function getInsertID(){

if(!$id=mysql_insert_id($this->mysql->conId)){

throw new Exception('Error getting ID');

}

return $id;

}

// seek row

public function seekRow($row=0){

if(!is_int($row)||$row<0){

throw new Exception('Invalid result set offset');

}

if(!mysql_data_seek($this->result,$row)){

throw new Exception('Error seeking data');

}

}

}

?>

PHP File (processform.php)

<?php

// include MySQL-processing classes

require_once 'mysql.php';

try{

// connect to MySQL

$db=new MySQL(array ('host'=>'localhost','user'=>'xxx','password'=>'xxx','database'=>'xxx'));

$searchterm=$db->escapeString($_GET['searchterm']);

$result=$db->query("SELECT firstname, lastname, comments FROM test WHERE MATCH (firstname, lastname, comments) AGAINST ('$searchterm')");

if(!$result->countRows()){

echo '<div class="maincontainer"><h2>No results were found. Go
back and try a new search.</h2></div>'."n";

}

else{

// display search results

echo '<div class="maincontainer"><h2>Your search criteria
returned '.$result->countRows().' results.</h2>'."n";

while($row=$result->fetchRow()){

echo '<div class="rowcontainer"><p><strong>First Name:
</strong>'.$row['firstname'].'<p><p><strong>Last Name:
</strong>'.$row['lastname'].'</p><p><strong>Comments:
</strong>'.$row['comments'].'</p></div>'."n";

}

}

echo '</div>';

}

catch(Exception $e){

echo $e->getMessage();

exit();

}

?>

Anyone know why this isn't working?

Thanks :-)