Page 2 of 3

Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:38 pm
by Jenk
About the coolest I've made was a customer <-> shop interaction system. Simply the customer places an order, and it has a comments field. The shop worker can add to it, as well as the customer, allowing them to use it as a kind of chat log.

The reason I found that to be cool, is because I did it by accident.. yet the customer loved it. :oops:

(I originally thought I had designed the system so that the customer had a comment field, and the shop workers had their own separate comment field but I managed to conflict the two and voila.. )

Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:45 pm
by n00b Saibot
feyd wrote:I haven't made anything cool.
yeah! because everything you make is so damn hot :lol:

Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:47 pm
by onion2k
I'm with Feyd on this topic. I've made a lot of applications and toys, but I know what the flaws in all of them are, so I don't think of any of them as especially cool. Other people seem to appreciate them a bit though, which is nice.

Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:56 pm
by n00b Saibot
onion2k wrote:I'm with Feyd on this topic. I've made a lot of applications and toys, but I know what the flaws in all of them are, so I don't think of any of them as especially cool. Other people seem to appreciate them a bit though, which is nice.
i can swear by your graphics skills :) A few of your graphics toys were amazing as well as eye-opener to the powers & abilities of GD. keep going man :)

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 3:37 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
I can't say I've made anything cool. Closest I've come is being 70% through a redevelopment of a 1999 PHP game called Solar Empire that I played for years. The whole reason why Quantum-Star.com exists as a domain...

Most other stuff I have finished tend towards Lite applications. Online note collaters, task managers and other misc. small apps. Maybe we should define "cool"? A DB frontend using Ajax is certainly up there :).

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:38 am
by GM
I haven't done anything particularly great - while I was a programmer, I used to mostly shipping data about and cleaning it up. One thing I did do, which was pretty simple but my company was very very impressed with was that I linked our online phone book to an internal instant messaging application. Result was that when you looked at the phone book, you could see who was online on this internal messenger system. So the company's phone bill was cut by 35%, as people could simply click on the user's name to lauch a "chat session" with them.

Not particularly clever, but the company thought it was well cool.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:21 am
by malcolmboston
coolest? hmmm, probably a windows explorer relpacement i built a while back to get rid of browsing files with explorer as anyone who uses computers regularly will tell you, that thing can get sluggish...

however the project i am probably proudest of is Quentia, i have pretty much a fully working system at home, but this site is aiming at taking on MySpace....

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 11:38 am
by Grim...
I quite like my Metaquiz and Cool Wall, but only because I made them recently :)

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:10 pm
by alex.barylski
Depends on your definition of cool... :P

I wrote a small little weather utility application, which parsed METAR weather data given an city ICAO code. It was a Windows system tray program, similar to others that exist today, but less featureful. It would update the weather every X number of minutes, dynamically redrawing the icon as a thermometer to indicate tempeture. Blue was cold and red was hot. When you maximized the window you had a detailed description of the weather such barometric pressure, etc, as well as wind, direction and what have you.

I wrote that program years ago, using only SDK C style windows API calls. I read a flying magazine which had a link to real time METAR reports on the NOAA web site, did some research and cranked out that little app.

It was sorta ground breaking in those days, although I never released publically...I used showed the guys at the local RC flying club I belonged to at the time and we used it for our flights. :P

I also wrote an Windows system tray utility which acted as a proxy server capturing HTTP requests, HTML, etc and modifying it dynamically before display in IE. It used SQLite as a database to store web site passwords.

It would scan HTML and search for FORM elements and compare those elements to the database of previously entered passwords, if the URL matched as well as the form element names, the proxy would send the login credentials for you and return the page as an authenticated user. I hate remembering passwords.

If the credentials didn't exist and you sumbitted them a little popup similar to ZoneAlarm would ask if you desired to store those passwords for a later date.

Atleast 3-4 years ago I wrote that and AFAIK it was ground breaking as I still don't know of anything that does quite that just yet. I wanted to add auto password change functionality to it, but as CAPTCHA started gaining steam I realized that little app had seen it's day and decided to scrap it. To bad cause it had alot of potential I think.

I hacked a default Windows EDIT control using some undocumented techniques which I learned over time to display hyperlinks for URL's, etc.

I later investigated the possibility of turning it into a full blown colorizing code editor...which I decided was impractical although possible. That control I deemed worthy of an article on codeproject.com

http://www.codeproject.com/editctrl/multi_hyperedit.asp

The coolest application I have ever developed was an entire system of sub-systems.

Done in PHP/MySQL in 2002 sometime. Admittedly it was horrible code in retrospect, but the mindset of enterprise software developers and hackers are quite different. It worked and it did what he wanted, but wasn't very maintainable. I estimate around 7,000 lines of adhoc PHP :P

It included:
- Knowledgebase
- CRM
- Newsletter
- Resource management (files, etc)
- Interactive classroom intergrated with the KB
- 3 tier user role management
- Calendars

And a few more things...it started by replacing open source programs which he found and were extremely buggy...my first introduction into using open source PHP applications...was seriously disappointing :P

a Cross browser DOM library which I'm working on...as well as my own PHP framework mimicking that of Zend I also consider interesting.

Likely most complex project would be a template engine I have been working on in theory only, which doesn't require any logic but is fully capable of rendering all but maybe the most complicated views.

My CMS: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/texocms

Although not ground breaking, it takes a different approach than most in how it creates and manages "web pages"

I have done tons of things I personally considered cool...some very cool...very innovative...I experiment alot...in fact only in the last 3-4 years have I considered following/learning best practices and begin to develop more enterprise style applications (maintainability, proper documentation, etc).

You can't make money in experimenting in esoteric areas such as hacking a Windows control or tinkering with a Kernel. Although that is what I love to do...it's difficult to make money doing it.

PHP has made it light years easier to develope large enterprise applications which I can totally appreciate. As cool as it is to tinker at a low level or desicover undocumented caveats, etc...PHP will actually make you money...which is always good.

Go PHP Go!!!
Go PHP Go!!!
Go PHP Go!!!

It's difficult to define cool applications or coolest code you've ever written...as everyones definition is different I guess. By the above are my opinions and experiences... :P

Cheers :)

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:27 pm
by onion2k
Grim... wrote:Cool Wall
<span style='color:blue' title='I&#39;m naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> love that.

http://www.lonford.co.uk/coolwall/show.php?id=78750893 <- Mine.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 2:01 pm
by Mordred
Hockey wrote:I also wrote an Windows system tray utility which acted as a proxy server capturing HTTP requests, HTML, etc and modifying it dynamically before display in IE. It used SQLite as a database to store web site passwords.
Hehe, I also wrote a local proxy server (hoping to do a replacement of Proxomitron) only I did it in PHP :)

Hockey wrote: Atleast 3-4 years ago I wrote that and AFAIK it was ground breaking as I still don't know of anything that does quite that just yet.
It's called "Wand" in Opera, and maybe the other (inferiour!) browsers have something similar as well. In fact, with each version of Opera, they release more and more features which I wanted done with the local proxy (one of the reasons I stopped developing it actually)

The coolest thing I've done is a template engine - it's lightning-fast, really easy to use, has virtually NO syntax (no code in templates, I hate that in Smarty et al) but you can use conditions of sorts. There are still some optimisations to be done, but it would lead to complications when using it which I'd rather avoid. After putting some more polish on it, I'll maybe post it for a review :)

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:29 pm
by alex.barylski
I would be interested in seeing your template engine... :P

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 12:05 pm
by Grim...
onion2k wrote:
Grim... wrote:Cool Wall
<span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> love that.

http://www.lonford.co.uk/coolwall/show.php?id=78750893 <- Mine.
Uncool Discovery?
/slappage

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 5:05 pm
by Chris Corbyn
The application manager I have going on as a side-project (framework with a graphical control panel etc built around it for handling multiple apps, rbac, mvc, agile development etc etc). Nobody will see any code until it's ready though... long way off yet. It's my most structured/layered code to date so I like it :)

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 5:08 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Mordred wrote:In fact, with each version of Opera, they release more and more features which I wanted done with the local proxy (one of the reasons I stopped developing it actually)
You were an Opera developer? :)