Many Changes

I've been looking at the demo program on two different browsers while Ken makes changes and I say yes or no to what it looks like. I think all of you will see quite a bit different in both the look and functionality. What's your overall impression of where things are now?

Feeback Needed

** this is the important part:
1.- Please look at the rope and tell me if you think the edges look reasonable as compared to a real bead crocheted rope. How reasonable do you think it looks when you change the shape of the beads used?

Then other things are:
2.- How's the speed of the "twirl" of the rope now?
3.- Does it bother you that the Graph beads are all the same shape no matter what shape the beads are on the rope?
4.- Do you like the "blank" feature making everything revert back to a neutral Gray rather than Black or White? (Judith's choice)

Note: everything is still all Flat Graphics as the neat things like shading are not that important to the functionality of this Demo - later for the nice to haves. Although feel free to bring up what you might consider to be nice to have.

Help... Ken has asked me to pick 100 beads, arrange them in rows of 20 so he can pick off the colors for the color chart block. Any ideas of how to do that and what to pick?

Bead Shape Commentary

The soft gray background is good. It's a nice neutral to see the beads against.

The rope bead shapes look good, too.

Something I just noticed. If you go to the rope beads to change a bead's color, it updates the graph simultaneously. But if you change a bead's color on the graph, the corresponding bead doesn't change color on the rope until you twirl the rope.

I'm with you on the graph beads not needing to look real. I think people are savy enough to deal with the graphs being more cartoon-like. And you're aiming to have more realistic beads on the rope.

Input Needed

Ken's made some changes that I like and some I thought might work.

He changed the spacing in the rope beads until I was satisfied that the patterns laid out like you would see in a real rope. A diamond & spiral were the tests patterns.

What do you think of the gray background? Is it easier to see the bead shapes? Also have added outlines to the graph beads.

NOTE: "rope beads" refers to the beads in the twirly rope. "Graph beads" refers to the beads in the graph.

We played with the rope bead shapes on each of the 3 selectable beads and think we've got a good representation of the cylinder and Japanese beads. Ken's working on making the Czech look more rounded. Look and tell us what you think. Do they sorta look like what the shape of the actual beads look like? Next thing will be to do different sizes on the rope beads.

I made a decision that I'd like all of you to comment on.... I said that the graph beads did not have to look like the actual beads.... that a graph is a graph and all 3 of the graphs could look the same. Do you agree or not?

Anyone using Explorer - Is the rope "twirl" fast enough for you? It's a lot faster in Firefox.

I'm off to a bead retreat for the weekend - hope to have a lot of good feedback from all of you when I get back and rounded Czech beads from Ken.

Twirling Rope Aligns Diamonds

You're right about the rows not lining up properly when you first draw your diamonds. I found, though, that the first click of the button to "twirl" the rope put everything where it belongs.

Pretty Beads

Ken and I were working on the spaces between the graph beads and the shapes this morning ..... For some reason Explorer keept giving me beads that had "feet" on the bottom, or they looked like "Tombstones".

You will now see a note to the left, next to the "(**) under the titles, that gives the version changes we're on.

After we hung up, I noticed that the display rope dosen't quite have the right "row to row" bead placement. While a diamond on the graph looks like a diamond, it doesn't on the rope. But, the "twirl" speed on the rope is a lot better.

Still working on functionality, with side trips into making the beads pretty. What do the rest of you think? Remember that you can post directly to this blog.

A Bloglines Tip

For the sake of our privacy, when you subscribe to Bead Designer via Bloglines, be sure to go to the bottom of the subscription page and change the Access type from "Public" to "Private".

What that will do is make sure that, if your Bloglines Blogroll is normally visible on the sidebar of your own blog (or anywhere else), the listing for Bead Designer won't show up. Just one more way to keep the blog out of the eyes of the general public.

Ken's Update

Ken is here and working on Explorer weirdness

today we got pallet beads, Judith's Explorer of course has a Tombstone instead of a bead

all of the rope rollovers say bob instead of the bead color, i.e. the weirdness

Blog Update

OK, we'll take our chances.... The only way I can figure out to let all of you add this to bloglines or any other feed service is to make it a public blog. As soon as I post this I'm going to go do that.

Know that I've set you all up as authors, so you can post directly to the blog and don't have to resort to using comments. At least I think you can..... I thought I could do the above thing and found out I couldn't!

A Work In Progress

This Blog was set up as a private, by invitation only, source to assist in getting Ken's Bead Crochet Designer program to be the best that it can be. It will also serve as a history of what happened when. Also, Ken can post his thoughts and changes to the blog instead of thinking about calling Judith in the middle of the night!

Please participate as no question or idea is too silly to be considered.

You might consider adding it to a Bloglines feed to keep track of when new posts are made.