GoldfishOS

I fixed one of my problems today by replacing the video with a gif, a caption and a sound that plays when the gif is clicked. If ya can’t make it work, just don’t make it worse. Windows still not opening or closing despite several tweaks (except the welcome window, my only ally). Won’t be able to do any more work today because it’s Canada Day and I have family stuff, but I have a plan for tomorrow.

These close buttons are fighting me every step of the way. The open buttons too. I changed the way that the windows are hidden by checking and changing the class of the window elements and went through all the IDs and variables in case the problem was in finding the right element. It still doesn’t work. The welcome screen is still working fine with this change and unlike all the other windows has been able to close this whole time. At this point, I’m out of ideas on how to fix this. Maybe I’ll go hunting through forums again (too bad that doesn’t count towards Stardust, because I seem to be doing a lot of it lately). In regards to the other features, the video is still not working, but I have a gif of the scene that I could add instead and just put captions underneath. As I got a bit sidetracked with my window problem, I never actually finished making the notes app. I’m planning to save that until later this week. The clicker game, thankfully, is still complete and nothing has broken. It isn’t a great game, but it’s there, which is more than I can say for everything else. If all goes according to plan, I’m hoping to ship this one at the end of the week.

Over the past couple of days, I have been working on a few things: the clicker game, having a video play in a window, and (most important and difficult) getting the windows to open and close. I have had success with one out of three of these tasks. The game was a lot easier than I expected - it just needed a variable that could increase when the image is clicked. The video seemed easy, but ended up being very stubborn. It will only play if it’s put in picture-in-picture mode, but I do have some hope for fixing it. The windows, though, will kill me. I think I just need to make a copy to mess around with and keep a decent version safe.

Well, the whole ‘tomorrow’ thing turned out to be a lie. Over the past couple of days, I tried to make a window for the notes app (worked), make it possible to select the notes app icon (worked), move the notes window (worked), open and close the notes window (didn’t work), add more icons to the screen (worked), make it possible to select those icons (didn’t work) and make a custom cursor (didn’t work). Most of the time was spent undoing the damage from trying to fix new bugs. It reminded me of a book I just read about the Apollo missions. The book said that the engineering motto of the team was “if you can’t fix the problem, do as little as possible to avoid making it worse”. They may have had a point. My next steps for this project will be to make it possible to select the app icons and to open and close the windows for the apps. If I can make that happen, I’ll move on to making the actual content of the apps and at the end I’ll circle back to the custom cursor.

Today I added the handle and close button to the welcome window. When the close button is clicked, a bubble popping sound is played. The close button is also a dead fish. The one thing I couldn’t get to work was the open window button, and I don’t have any ideas for why it isn’t working. Google also doesn’t seem to know, but I think that’s ok, because I wanted the welcome screen to only show once anyway. Next I’ll be doing the style sheet, and then hopefully the first app will be partially completed by the end of tomorrow.

Woah, did some Javascript for the first time…. scary…. Anyways, got the top bar working a lot better with displaying the actual time, not whatever time I put in the placeholder. Also, I added a sound effect for when the os logo is clicked (bubbles!!). I’m starting to get the hang of HTML and CSS I think, so I’m hoping to add a little more customization soon. Has anyone watched The Amazing Digital Circus? If so, you know which fish I’m hoping to incorporate into a “finances” app in the next couple of days.

Hooray! Made a bunch of progress with my webOS, including:

• Finishing the boot screen
• Adding a (lovely) moving background
• Started work on the top bar, which I’ll probably finish tomorrow evening
  I also added the Github repository to the project info. My immediate to-do list now includes:
• Finish the top bar
• Figure out how to add the sound effect for the mouse (which I suspect will be a challenge)
  Super happy with how this is going!

Very clumsily made my way through making the boot screen (or at least a first draft of the boot screen) with my nonexistent HTML and CSS skills. I am…. learning so much. It took a while to figure out how to access an image from the folder, but I got it eventually. Also, I added a cool font I found. I’ll probably change it later because it doesn’t really fit the style, but it’s fine for now. Next I’m going to try to set the background to some kind of gif or video (not sure how/if it’s possible so might not work) to make the background look like the bottom of a pond. Another idea I had (no idea how to do this either) is for a bubble sound to play when you click anywhere. I’ll try to get the boot screen done tomorrow, then off to the next step! (Btw I hope you all appreciate my artistic talent)