{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 60 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

A few months ago we integrated Google calendar into an application that we built for a client. Anyway, today I sat down to customize which calendars certain events were being created on. We’re using the Zend Framework’s GData package to interact with Google Calendar and surprisingly the documentation is pretty lacking.

Specifically, I was looking to create events on a calendar that was not the “primary” calendar for a user. After poking around and experimenting, I finally got things to work.

First, you can retrieve the list of available calendars with:

Next, when creating the events pass in the uri and the events will appear on the alternate calendar.

self::$service->insertEvent($event, $arr[1][“uri”]);

A week or so ago my Dad asked if we could have our designer put together a logo for him. Unfortunately, our guy was buried under a mound of work and generally couldn’t help us out. We haven’t always had the best luck with Craigslist so I was ready to try something new.

Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing a good amount of chatter surrounding “spec” design sites especially 99designs.com. After taking a look around the site I figured now was a good time to give it a shot. We were on a tight budget, tight time line, and my Dad didn’t have much direction for the logo.

I posted up a contest last Sunday here and we were looking at entries by Monday afternoon. Now things got more difficult. We were having a hard time coming up with “star ratings” and constructive feedback in general. My Dad’s staff was having a hard time not getting pigeon holed by the submitted designs and Setfive wasn’t doing a great job helping them along.

We did our best and we felt like the entries were moving in the right direction. Then the contest closed. In the last 8 hours of the contest the number of entries nearly doubled. With 70 entries we now had the problem with objectively picking a winning logo.

At this point, I wanted some more input on what people thought about the logos. I decided to create a set of Amazon Mechanical Turk tasks to get some feedback.

After about a day, I had 200 responses asking for user’s top three logos and any additional comments they had.

Some of the comments I got back were insightful and moving:

Don’t pick any of the logos on the second page. They all look terrible.
Due to nature of your business I would prefer a sober and serious looking logo.
I chose these three because they are visually appealing, and convey a sense of being able to ease pain.
I suffer from cronic pain. I wish you the best of luck in finding your logo. People that do your type of work are a life line for people like me. Hope I hope have helped.

I tallied up the results by weighting +3, +2, +1 for first, second, and third choices respectively. The results were interesting.

Every logo received at least one vote.
The top ten logos accounted for just about 41% of all the votes.
Only counting the top choice caused 3 logos to fall out of the top ten.

The top ten logos as voted by the Amazon Mechanical Turks were:

Entry ID	Votes	URL
88	76	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88
78	65	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/78
75	60	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/75
87	55	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/87
91	51	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/91
58	48	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/58
47	42	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/47
90	41	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/90
43	36	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/43

Personally, I like the top ten logos and my Dad’s staff seems to like many of the same logos that were voted up. It’s been an interesting experiment almost exclusively using the “crowd” to design and then select a logo. I’m not sure if we’ll use 99designs in the future but it has been a pleasant experience.

We still haven’t picked a winning logo but I’ll update once we do!

Update:

We finally picked a winner! We decided to go with the crowd and selected http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88 as the winning logo.

Recently we were working on a project in which we needed to switch from forms auto-formatting themselves ( <?php echo $form;?>) to allow for much more customization in the output. While there is a Symfony Forms for Designers chapter in the forms documentation, it doesn’t help much for iterating over a form object and customizing the output. There is a simple foreach($form as $field) that will iterate over every field in the form. The problem with this is when you have embedded forms and you want to do something different with the formatting on them. This will iterate over all the fields and you will not know when the field is the embedded form or not. So we came up with the following which works:

This will work fine for a form with as many as single embedded forms. It allows you to easily use the same view for multiple forms and be able to customize their embedded forms easily. If you have only one form that you will be doing this with, and are worried about performance we recommend then not using a foreach loop and doing it by hand, this will save you on performance as you will not have as many if statements in each iteration.

For a recent project, I had to extract the text out of a PDF so that I could save it into a database table.

Normally, I would of used the popular pdftotext program but it wasn’t available in the particular environment I was working in. I contact support and they advised that the XPDF package has several X windows dependencies and that’s why they had not installed it. Fair enough.

I poked around a bit and found Apache’s PDFBox library. I downloaded the package and looked at the examples. Sure enough there was a program called “ExtractText” that did exactly what I wanted.

Using ExtractText is similar to pdftotext – just pass in the PDF file and the text comes back. Awesome.

Anyway, hats off to Ben Litchfield who wrote the ExtractText example. I rebuilt the ExtactText.java file as a standalone project and packaged it as a JAR.

I’ve attached the JAR and Eclipse project if anyone wants a copy of either.

The JAR

The Eclipse Project

Today we were working on minifying our Javascript and CSS files for a site we are launching tomorrow. We came across that we didn’t want to have to get the repository out of sync and update view.yml to only include our single CSS style sheet and one javascript file when working between developement environment and production. What we wanted was the following in view.yml the javascripts: and stylesheets: parameters to change depending on what environment you are loading, however using prod: and dev: in this didn’t work like app.yml does. An example of this would be:

all:
  title: My site
dev:
  stylesheets:[styleone.css,styletwo.css,stylethree.css]
  javascripts:[one.js,two.js,three.js]
prod:
  stylesheets:[style.min.css]
  javascripts:[main.min.js]

This way we could have them load in production much quicker and reduce load time, however still easily debug the files in development environments. After looking around a bit we couldn’t find any standard current solution so we came up with the following. In app.yml we defined two variables for the dev and production environments – javascript_files and css_files. Here you put the list of the files you wanted to loaded in each environment. Then in view.yml it now looks like:

all:
  title: My Title
  stylesheets: [<?php echo sfConfig::get('app_css_files');?>]
  javascripts: [<?php echo sfConfig::get('app_javascript_files');?>]

The configuration variables get their value depending on the environment you are running in so it loads the proper files. With this configuration we can easily debug in development environment and still have minified versions of the CSS and Javascript in production environement. Hopefully this will save some of you time and make your life easier.

Google Calendar API create on alternate calendar

99designs and Amazon. Design. Crowd sourced.

Update:

Iterating over Symfony Forms for Custom Output

Extracting text from PDFs without pdftotext

Loading Different Javascript/CSS Files in Different Environments