Mid-assignment submission

Mid-assignment submission was a few hours' ago, and I am drained. We were panicking during the lecture itself because we were trying to double-check everything and seeing if we had misunderstood anything. (e.g. Does 'icon' in Aspiration 3 refer to favicon or the actual icon?) We ended up badgering Div and Jon Lew a lot. 

My contributions this time round was mainly drawing the schema, and for suggesting to use Mercurial and Code Igniter. I think, to Jin Guan and Shao Hua, using frameworks is too much of an effort, when they can just code everything in raw PHP, but I found it rather useful, especially in database access. I think I'm just too used to the Drupal 7 way of writing SQL queries. But in any case, I think it's good that we learnt a different framework (along with MVC!), especially one that is much lighter as compared to Drupal 7. 

One smart thing that I did was using MySQL Workbench to generate the schema, by connecting to the actual database. All you have to do is to provide your credentials, and tada, the schema is ready for viewing. It even draws out the Foreign Keys correctly. I learnt about this software during CS2102, from Jon Lew, and I think it's really useful, as it can even forward-engineer (i.e. from schema to actual SQL code.) 

It probably took me a longer time to draw the arrow
 than for MySQL Workbench to generate the schema.

Another thing I played with was drawing the favicon! I used a favicon generator to make the favicon.

Although it looks like a lol, it's not really it. Rather than that, it's supposed to look like a person cheering you on with his two arms, and that ties in with our app. I guess I better explain that somewhere in our application itself, since most people I talked to didn't know the relevance of it.

The interesting point about favicon is that the actual colour may not be seen when it is displayed as a small favicon. In the picture above, you can see tons of blue and brown, but once you shrink it down, you can only recognise it as black. It's interesting how our eye can trick us in that sense. Also, you may ask why brown and blue instead of it being grey. In painting, to add dark tones, we sometimes use dark blue and brown instead of just adding black (which is considered too dark), so I guess the same concept occurs here, i.e. using dark blue and brown to lighten and soften the edges. 

Ahh, and that was my foray into doing part of the design for our Facebook app. Back to playing with the database!

Edit: Also, I did something silly. I forgot to set the Mercurial Repository settings to 'Private'. BIG FACEPALM there. Thank goodness Colin reminded us to check.