(Link to Part 3)

When it comes to apps in progress, children are like upper management (or is it the other way around?).  You could write the most impressive server application that crawls every photo sharing site, combs comments, and does facial recognition to match any new photo to existing ones.  You could then create a simple test page to upload a photo and return the name of the person in the photo.  Then you show it to your VP.  After you upload a photo of “Batman” and it returns “Christian Bale” her comment would be “…why is the button not centered?”

My kids are the same way.  When I showed them Ryan Words on the iPad, they didn’t “get it” because the app was currently cycling through a bunch of hard-coded words like “sdfsdf” and “dfgdfg”.   So I had to go get some real words, suitable for a kid audience.  This is harder than you may think.  I Googled for “charades words”.  I avoided clicking on the “adult” ones (really people?), but found most of the others were “printable” so slips of paper could be put into a hat (i.e. .pdf).   I finally found one site which had words in HTML so I could scrape the page.  I debated then creating a mysql database to hold these, serving up JSON for the app.  However, this seemed like a detour (and I know I’d spend 1/2 a day evaluating toolkits, looking at django JSON plugins, then writing the 10 lines of php in the end).  I compromised and put the XHR code into the app, but have a static .json file on the server.  I wrote a little bash script to take the raw lists and convert them into JSON arrays.  I won’t even bother posting the hack script, but I can say that looking at it I did create some amazing write-only code

cat $A_FILE | sed '/^[A-Z]$/ d' | sed '/^\s*$/ d' | sed '/\./ d' | sed '/(/ d' | sed "/'/ d" | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sed '/\"/ d' | doIt

I love scripting.  Pure hackery.

Off to the finish line for Ryan’s Words.

(Edit: Link to Part 5)