Thought

1. Prototyping is very important.
    - It helps me to visualize a design idea and possible modifications.

2. No documentation is better than source code.
    - When using third party api, most of the documentation is not clearly enough to help me fit the api into my own situation.

3. Incremental integration testing is necessary.
    - When using the google visualization api (charts api), I'd better implement it individually first and make it work. The api is a little more complicated than other apis.

4. During the implementation process of this project I have found that although I have extensively commented my own code, I still find it hard to make adjustment right after some changes in the code.
    - Some parts of the implementation is completely depended on other parts of the code, and they need to be changed when the depended parts have been changed. I need to find  a way of documentation to aid me in visualize the features of a module.

5. The scope of a project should be considered at the beginning and necessary adjustments should be made during the process of the project. In this case, there are two major factors that limit the scope of this project which are time constrain and available api.

6. Learn to progressively improve the quality of a project. That's why there are different version of the same products, and that's why programmers need to write code in a easy-to-manage manner.

Almost finished

The draft version of the integration application has been finished, and currently I am working on the refinement.
There are limitations in this extension due to the completely dependence on the Google Chrome browser. The executing speed is not fast, which is due to the HTML5 implementation on Chrome. There is only limited space for websql on Chrome also.
Now I am working on code refactoring and trying to reduce the limitations as much as possible.

Working on the Integration of the Application

I have finished learning CSS to aid the implementation of the application, and currently I am working on file io on JavaScript, which is needed by timeline.js.

As to the overall integration, I have finished the architecture design and UI design. And since I can copy and paste most of the code from individual extensions, I am thinking of finishing the coding work by tomorrow.

In terms of the Human Ethic Application, I am aiming at to submit a second time before 23 July 2012, for the time needed for all supervisors to sign. And I think I definitely need to change something in the application form, for previously almost everything is estimate. 

Start the integration work

I start to work on the integration of the two application today. And I found that working with css is rather annoying, a silly mistake can take hours to fix. I need to spend some time on learning css.

I am struggling with the layout of the word clouds and the timeline as well. Normally, people have either of them, instead of both. And I am thinking of setting the page as big as a computer screen, which makes the page compact when fit both the clouds and the timeline together.

Progress

Yesterday I finished review and submitted the Human Ethic Application Form. It turned out that the Human Ethic Office wasn't that easy to find. Luckily, someone gave me some help.

Now I can concentrate on the integration implementation of the Chrome extension, and hopefully, I can finish it in 4 weeks.(The finals are coming and I still have two assignments to do...)

Finished all the application forms and documents needed to be attached to it.

Printed and signed.

I will send the application tomorrow.

Information Synchronsation

I have been searching for information synchronsation methods, and I have found some javascript implementation like http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2005-Experimenting-With-Offline-Data-Synchronization-Using-jQuery-And-ColdFusion.htm. However, all synchronsation methods I have found seems just work on small amount of data, and sense the user might have a large amount of email to sync when he/she first use the extension, the workload tend to be very high. So, I need to test if those methods are applicable.

Concurrently, I was also working on the experiments on websql and web socket to ensure the extension is able to provide the best functionality.

This week, I started to write the progress report, which is due in week 12. This report need 20 to 30 pages, so I will mainly focus on it in the coming week.