Since this week’s project was to re-organize code into a better system creating a cleaner workflow, I thought this would be a good week to start coding in an entirely new IDE as well. I had been meaning to find some sort of third-party program to do my coding in for a while now, largely because I sometimes like to go offline when I’m doing coding work. I noticed that Daniel had started using Atom in some of his newer vids, so Atom looked like a good option.
I was delighted to find that Atom was a free download with an active community supporting it. After a while of googling and searching the best way to use it, I got it working so that I could view my code on a local server with Firefox.
While I was working on my quiz this week, a small mistake that I had made seemed oddly appealing.
I had accidentally deleted the background, causing my bouncing balls to leave a colorful trail in their wake. I had already decided that I wanted to combine my test slider from last week into a single class that could be easily copy-pasted into another project, so I decided that for my week four project I would use two sliders created from the same class template to control the speed of these ellipses as they left a rainbow trail around the screen.
Well, as is often the case in coding, that task turned out to be more complicated than I had thought it would be. Replacing what I had created for the original slider test wasn’t quite the easy copy-paste job that I had hoped.
While I did eventually get them working, they don’t quite work as well as the original did. My last slider had a function that kept the “sliderMoving” Boolean active until the mouse was released, which meant that you wouldn’t lose control of your slider if your mouse just accidentally slipped off of it. It sounds like a small thing, but it really made a difference in functionality.
Additionally, I couldn’t get changes to variables within the class itself to affect anything in the draw function, which meant that I couldn’t get them to affect the speed of the rainbow bouncing balls. The ellipses that I ultimately used to demonstrate that the sliders were working were written into the slider classes themselves.
I think it’s important to mention my shortcomings on this project, because this is something I’d really like to come back to. A slider class is something that I can imagine coming in handy on any number of projects, so fixing this at some point would be a really worthwhile thing to do.