I finally got around to actually looking at your article in detail last night, and I have to criticize your article a bit. PLEASE take this as helpful criticism. I mean no offense. And by the way- what I wrote below is as much for EVERYONE writing articles on Google as it is you. You made the same mistake I keep seeing over and over on these Google pages. – You forgot who your audience is. Savvy programmers might catch on at a glance, but you aren’t writing for the savvy. You are writing for beginners and every article should explain step by step and in detail everything. You made too many assumptions and you based your article on your gadget specifically. I know a lot of authors do that, and it is helpful to have a gadget to look at to follow the article. However, your article has code snippets that to be honest when I first saw made no sense. I had no clue what you were doing. So I got your gadget and tore it open and then I understood. You created pages called fetcher.js and parameters.js and had these in a folder called Objects. That may have been obvious to an experienced coder, but I’m not that. I had to get your gadget and study it to figure that out.
Articles should not require the reader to get someone’s gadget to understand. An article should be understandable as a standalone tutorial, and the gadget can be extra. Going back to your article, write it the way a beginner will recognize and understand. Combine your elements onto main.js or EXPLICITLY tell the reader your example has things spread across three pages and give a good reason why. Point out what difference it makes, and keeping mind the readers are beginners, say things like “don’t forget to declare your new fetcher.js in your main.xml”. Honestly, I’m just trying to help you improve the article a bit. It was helpful and gave me a good starting point, but I wasted half the evening trying to figure out what the heck before I caught on to the parameters.js. I doubt any beginner is going to know that setup. For your article, just declare variables on main.js like a beginner would understand. As I said, your article gave me a good starting point. As soon as I got it working I realized this would fill the db table with tons of useless data. So I redid it, some minor changes in the gadget and a different approach with the mysql and now the table has “installed”, “installedDate”, “removed”, and “removedDate” fields being updated based on “gadgetID” key. There is also a “status” field that gets marked as “active” or “inactive”. This keeps data entries minimal, and more organized. I put a function in the onClose of the gadget to signal the “removed” and the dbquery looks for matching entries based on the gadgetID to either make a new entry or update an existing one. But it still isn’t that great. Every time the user closes the desktop app or even reboots, it generates a new ID. My setup will give me an accurate real-time view of how many gadgets are active, but I’d prefer not to have a new entry for the same gadget/user. I seriously want a want to store a gadgetID value more permanently, or possibly pull something from the computer that would always be unique- like the cpu ID or MAC address. So far, I haven’t found anything that leads me to believe that is possible. Probably a privacy concern. I’m looking into user prefs- but I'm not sure if that'll work either. Anyway, thanks for a good idea! It gave me a solid starting point. Any input on the best way to store a value permanently? Austin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Desktop Developer Group" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop-Developer?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
