My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.

So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.

So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.

So, all you need to use ProxyCal is to have a Google Account. This simplified things to quite an extent form the development point of view as it avoided me from maintaining a separate database for tracking a user’s attendance. I wanted my app to be ajaxy so I used the Google Calendar JavaScript API which meant I didn’t have to go through the tedious process of making XMLHTTPRequests to a proxy on my server which in turn used the Google Calendar Data API.

The entire app is almost completely developed using JavaScript. There is a bit of PHP to store some settings related data.

Some of the fun and useful features of ProxyCal are:

1. By default, it assumes you went to college on weekdays and college was off on weekends i.e Sat and Sun. This means, when you visit the app after some time, it automatically assigns the default statuses to the previous days in the month.

2. It uses the following color scheme:
Green – You went to college
Red – You took a leave
Yellow – College was Off

3. It allows you to set the cutoff percentage i.e. what percentage of attendance you are supposed to meet on a monthly basis.

4.  It also gives you an estimate of the no. of days you can take a leave in the current month.

5. You can edit the status for any day by simply clicking on it. It display’s a popup where you can simply set the new status.

For those of you wondering where the name came from, it does have some logic behind it. This app, in essence, assumes that once you went to college you either attended all the lectures or atleast had someone call a proxy for you
You cannot set attendance for all lectures separately. That would have made the app a little too complicated which was exactly the opposite of what I was striving to achieve.

ProxyCal is currently in beta. That means I am still working on it. Here are some features I would be adding soon:

1. Ability to store your weekly timetable so that ProxyCal can give you an estimation of your attendance in each subject.
2. A screencast demonstrating use of ProxyCal. Even though it is very simple to use.
3. Ability to download a PDF of the attendance log for any selected time period.
4. ProxyCal does not work on Internet Explorer.

I have developed ProxyCal in an agile manner. I wanted to get it done quickly for two reasons. One, I couldn’t wait to start using it . Also, I have to look up things for the coming summer so I don’t want to be stuck up on what I already know how to do.

And so, ProxyCal is yet another example of an app I have built as a result of my personal needs. Maybe in future, I may think about creating something ( similar to ProxyCal ) which will be useful for a wider audience, like highlighting deadline for events.

You can start using ProxyCal by going here : http://ankitahuja.com/apps/proxycal

And as the footer of this app so prominently says,

“Thou shall not run short on attendance ever again!”

Here is a screenshot:

Be free to suggest me any features or report back any bugs or just comment. You can use the feedback tab on the left on the app page for this purpose.

I have an Orkut filter setup on my Gmail, so that all the emails notifying me of scraps skip the Inbox. Today, however, I decided to check my Orkut emails. And guess what, the first mail I saw was from the Orkut guys giving me the weekly statistics of my Opensocial application!

Here it is:

Here are the statistics for your OpenSocial app twitter.xml on orkut for the week of 2008/12/30: 

App submitted to orkut on 2008/11/04
Number of unique users who installed the app this week: 77
Total number of unique users who currently have the app installed: 532
Number of times profile pages of users who have installed this app were viewed: 16395
Number of times this app was viewed in canvas view: 446

Wow, and until now I thought that less than 100 users were using my application!

I think the Orkut team only recently started mailing developers weekly stats. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully they will continue to do so.

I already tweeted about this but I thought this was exciting enough to deserve a mention on my blog. Also, now that I have a decent no. of followers on Twitter, I am hopeful that more people would be reading this blogpost. So, hello tweeps!

Only recently, I came across TheStatBot. I really liked the idea of twitter wordles, like mine above. It gives you a quick refresh on what the person talks about on twitter. If you look for more than a minute on my Twitter wordle above, you can sum up that I usually talk about cool apps, twitter(ofcourse), India, API’s, design, college etc. If you look deeper into the cloud, you will know that I have talked about twitkut, Internet, Mac, last.fm, coffee, firefox, etc.

It wasn’t exactly a very smooth process to come up with it, though. At first, I tried using my twitter RSS feed on wordle.net . That didn’t work, as it then only considered my recent 20 or so tweets. What I wanted was that it should span across all my tweets. Then, I came across a python script created by Yuvi Panda that simply takes all your tweets ( max. 3200 are allowed by the twitter API ) and puts them into a txt file. You can simply then copy all the text and use it on wordle.net.

I am pretty certain there is room for a webapp for this. If only wordle had an API. I believe TheStatBot is working on extending wordles to services like FriendFeed, etc.

Update:

You can checkout the script using svn:

svn checkout http://goodfather.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/GoodFather/MonaN

I use Twitter a lot. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update frequently on Twitter. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also read them from Orkut itself. That will mean they will not have to register on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It also allows you to post updates to your twitter account from within Orkut using OAuth.

It makes use of Google’s OpenSocial JavaScript API as well as Twitter’s Search API to access the tweets.

OpenSocial is still pretty nescient, especially if you have seen the Facebook API. I was pretty dissappointed at times with the lack of features in the API. For eg., a chief functionality of my app would have been to update the status of the Orkut user with his/her latest tweet. But, the API didn’t allow it.

Also, to post an update to a user’s activity stream, the owner of the app must visit their profile page or the Twitkut application. This makes it impossible to automatically poll for new tweets and post them to a user’s activity stream. Maximum 2 updates are allowed to a user’s activity stream in a day.

Another feature OpenSocial currently lacks is that there is no way for the developer to keep track of who or how many users are using his application. I feel this should have been one of the first features that should have been implemented in the API, to allow developers to see analysis of their app usage from within Orkut.

There was one more thing that made me cringe. The Orkut sandbox allows using Opensocial 0.8 api whereas prod.sandbox.orkut.com as well as orkut.com only allow Opensocial 0.7 at this point of time. Nowhere did they mention this loud and clear. So, I ended up making the app using Opensocial 0.8. Then I got to know that I had to use Opensocial 0.7 if I wanted to submit my app to Orkut ( of course that’s the reason I am developing the app ) and so I had to make some redundant changes all over again.

On the brighter side, I was very happy with the response at the Orkut Developer Forum. Jason and others helped me along the way and were kind enough to answer all my queries. Without their help, I would certainly have been unable to develop this app. It also cleared some of my concepts regarding caching, etc.

All in all, I am pretty happy with the final result. I have received nice feedback from people who have already started using Twitkut.

So, if you use Orkut and you are a Twitter crazy person and want to share your tweets with a wider world, you can add the application by going here.

Follow updates on development: @twitkut

Follow me: @ahujaankit

Update: Twitkut is now visible in Orkut profiles. The profile view will improve gradually. This is after Twitkut was temporarily not visible on Orkut profiles as the profile view had to re-built using OPML.

Update: PollBol is currently down due to server deployment issues. Take a look at the screenshots instead.

PollBol is an exciting web app that adds a twist to conventional polling by adding an additional social aspect to it. After making FriendComparé, which was a mashup making use of the Last.fm API, I wanted to make a more independent app that maintained its own data.

Even so, I fully support the idea of making use other apps’ APIs. It makes it easier for the users to adopt since it builds on the functionality of the more popular app. And so, FriendComparé has had comparatively far more visitors as compared to PollBol due to the popularity of Last.fm.

With PollBol, I had to think of a development platform that would allow me to complete the project within my summer vacations. And what better for agile development than Ruby On Rails. It was exciting to use Rails as it divides the entire project into three parts: Models, Views and Controllers. And this makes it easier to plan on the various modules of the project.

I started out with the basic models of Questions, Answers and Users and then added modules as I started getting more comfortable with Rails. It makes it very easy to create models through migrations. You don’t need to know much of Sql in order to be able to manage data in a database.

Rails also makes it dead simple to create views for your app, though eventually to make your app look better, you need to have decent CSS skills. Usually, for each Controller, there is a corresponding View. The controller acts as a glue between the model and the view. The Controller performs all the programming part whereas all the formatting information is contained in the View. Rails also provides Helpers, which help to make Views even more simple and less complicated.

Google Charts API came in handy to display the results of polls.

Though PollBol hasn’t had as many users as FriendComparé, only a handful of people who I really had to convince to help me test the app :p ( thanks Sameer, Neha, etc.), it was a fascinatingly learning and fun experience developing it.

Some of the unique features in PollBol are:

1. You can add additional answers/choices to a poll if you don’t like the available ones

2. You can be friends with other users so you can follow their activity

3. RSS Feeds for public activity, latest polls, popular polls, etc.

4. Commenting on Polls

PollBol hasn’t been tried by too many people yet. Maybe its because I haven’t tweeted or blogged about it. Also, unless its an app as popular as twitter or last.fm, with the social webapps overload, people normally cringe at the thought of registering at a new website ( including me ). Maybe in future, I will allow non-registered users to participate in polling as well as integrating it with OpenID.

Meanwhile, here are a few screenshots for you to chew on:

Yes, it is called Friendcomparé. To describe it simply, it basically lets you compare your musical tastes with your last.fm friends and neighbors.  You just enter your last.fm username and it brings up a list of your friends and neighbors with whom you can compare. Once you choose to compare, it shows you the top tracks, artists, albums, tags, friends as well as recently played tracks that are common between both the users.

Though it isn’t anything huge, I am happy with it. It took some effort, probably more in the design part than in the development part, to get it somewhat pleasing to the eyes and yes, functional. But it was a fun and learning experience. Along the way, Sameer gave me some brilliant ideas and criticism, for which I am grateful to him. Also, a couple of people at my favorite IRC channal, #think-digit, who gave me criticism and a third-person point of view, and also appreciation

As I went on coding and adding new little features, I learnt a lot on creating CSS layouts and programming with PHP. I learnt a lot more CSS tricks which are definitely going to help me out in my next webdesign project . And while coding with PHP, I eventually got hints about its object oriented nature and that how it could make expanding the application a very simple task. In future, I would probably like to make use of AJAX to make it a little more web 2.0

I have this idea of probably building a facebook or orkut application for it, will it be useful? You can let me know in the comments.

Here are a few screenshots:

Build.last.fm: http://build.last.fm/item/433