Summer Coding, the goodness

Well for starters this has been a pretty dull Summer. Because of the general lack of clear sky I have found myself more inclined to be inside and chilling out while doing something productive.  This has lead to the progression of a few of the projects I help out with.

This isn’t due to any major coding on my part  it’s mainly because me and Ryan have had the time to bounce ideas and do testing and things. Ryan is the main developer on these projects, he’s pretty awesome at it.

I was talking with Ryan the other day about the best way to make traction on projects, more specifically Melative. Ryan wants to get more focus so that development is more progressive I guess. We only covered it briefly but the idea was floated that Melative is an Open Resource.

The concept of an Open Resource I guess is, “a service/tool that provides a function that can change due to need”. That need could be defined by anyone who wanted to have input on the project. It also implies access is fairly open to individuals but that doesn’t mean access can’t be restricted.

If Melative is treated like an Open Resource then the focus shifts to trying to make the resource effective in management of information and in serving that information. Melative already has an API that allows it’s functionality to be called remotely. The focus perhaps needs to remain on how generally the information is best managed and called.

This is really separate from developing the UI to look pretty. The UI can follow good development that happens on the internals. The main parts to the service are really entering/editing content and pulling that content via API functions. The way the data is displayed on the Melative website is merely an example of how the content and function of the service can be used.

In saying that I recently posted a tidbit on the idea of Open Source UI and with Melative we now have this as a possibility. Ryan and I spent the afternoon smashing our heads against the wall trying to do things we assumed would be easy in Git. We were mistaken, however Ryan did get the whole shibang working. So basically there is a few of us who can now do as we please in regards to the UI.

This is pretty cool and as of yet I’m not quite sure where I’m heading. I think my first steps will be to just get all the code uniform and working consistently across browsers. I’m not exactly the worlds best designer so I’ll stick to making the code pretty until I can think of any innovations.

Anyway I think that I should go make dinner now. It’s been rad ladies.