Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Fiddling and tweaking

Since releasing MapTag I've made a number of minor adjustments to the UI in response to comments.

However, it doesn't work in IE8 and that will not change.

The more fun part has been adding a visual index of saved games and previously played games which players completed in less than 10 minutes and less than 125km from the target. Click the "more games" tab to view that. It would be nice to dynamically adjust the criteria, but App Engine doesn't allow an inequality query on more than one field. It's a bit of a struggle to understand why it cannot do something that's elementary to any SQL query, until one considers its intended scalability.

So instead, I had to add a boolean field for 'successful', and if I want to change the criteria I have to run a bit of python script* to run through all the records and recompute it.  One hundred twenty-five kilometers is a pretty broad definition of success, but I wanted it a bit broad for countries that don't have a Roman-based alphabet, which is hard for us Roman alphabetters to Google for. For someplace like Thailand, if you get the right country, you still have a chance of "success."

* the server side I originally wrote in Java, but since Python is faster for certain datastore operations, the boyfriend recommended we switch to that. Did I mention I didn't know any Python? or hardly anything about server side programming?

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