In good fashion, before registration starts, I delievered YACS 1.0. And as the author of a version 1.0 product, it suffers the same product-embarrassment. Ironically, that's a good thing. A couple features I could name off the top of my head as good milestones for version 2.0:

• Time filtering - To exclude schedules that have sections in specific times (e.g. "I don't want morning classes")
• Improved Scheduling View - Viewing schedules one at a time is definitely not optimal.

Those would be the two primary features for 2.0, everything else would be secondary. Also, I intend to create screencasts (or a series of written tutorials) about how I designed, developed, and created YACS. It would cover a variety of topics around programming that aren't normally covered in classes: version control, development tools and environments, deploying, design, usability, and programming tricks. It will provide a great insight to how and why code was written. 

It's a bright future. I'll see you at version 2.0

Yesterday (Friday, Oct 21st), I presented and talked about my project for the first time. Here's the slides, but it probably won't be as useful without the video.

I felt the presentation could be improved a lot (e.g. don't use an apple remote and practice even more), but the reception great, but there's still a lot left to do!

Not much to say, but designing takes awhile. I'm using 320-and-up for responsive design, which requires many designs for the same page. Here's some screenshot to illustrate it.

That's just one page, and that's only 3 of 8 stylesheets. I'll probably have to restrict it to only three stylesheets if I am to complete version 1 before course registration (Nov 7th).

Similarly, here's the schedule listing:

I wasted too much time doing premature optimizations. The computation of schedules takes a small, but noticable amount of time. So I thought I would cache the schedules in the database. But there are two problems after developing initial prototypes:

• There is no good method of storing schedules as normalized data (since they need to store the list of sections and courses they use.
• Large number of insertions into the database is slow.

So after wasting a week of time on this optimization feature, which turned out to be slower than the original naive implementation, I reverted back to the schedule generation on the fly. I'm punting the generating until it becomes a problem. I need to focus on the design.

I have some sketches made of some ideas about the UI. But to scope it down, I need to focus entirely on the web UI. But I've attached them here for reference. I've been working on the design and have developed a new colorscheme I'm much more comfortable with.

All the mockups were done on the ipad.