Small update to the site, I have added images to both the Writing and Game Projects sections of the site. For the Writing section I have added an image relating to what I had written about and for the Game Project section I added screen caps of the games.
Almost Ready to Unveil Neo/Ipsum
As the title says Neo/Ipsum is almost ready for release, just have a few more visual iterations, bug checks, and the like and it should be ready. In the mean time I have a page on my site describing Neo/Ipsum (and Lorem Ipsums in general). The page will be under the Projects tab along with my Games, Artwork, and Writings or you can find it here.
New Banner Picture
I have a new banner picture! So Why does it have two pictures of me? Those that know me know that I often grow out a beard (usually because I forget to shave) and keep it grown out like that for long periods of time. But I also shave the beard off at the drop of a hat. So when people see me it is a bit of a coin toss whether or not I will have a beard, hence the double portrait.
Work on the site continues! Nothing of note posted yet but work is going on behind the scenes and should be ready soon.
More Updates
More updates to the Game Projects page with better descriptions for most of the games.
Also I took a bunch of pictures to be used for the website. Both with and without my beard. Look forward to seeing those.
Continuing Website Work
Still working on updating my website here is some of the stuff I have done in the last few days.
Moved everything over from the old site to the same site as my blog. Still have lots of update work to do but this first step already makes it look better.
Getting close to a revamped resume and will shortly update the online version.
Reworked the Art gallery in to slide shows. WordPress made this very easy.
Moving over my animation work wasn’t as simple as everything else because of some of the formatting decisions I made previously. But this meant I got to learn how easy it is to add YouTube videos to a WordPress page.
Made an about me page for me to ramble about myself on. Adding to it as I think of relevant things to say. Currently on it: basic overview of me, Design vs. Development, and why it took my 6 years to finish college.
Started working on the Game Projects page. Moved over all the files to word press so visitors can download the games. Starting to update the descriptions.
New Year, New Site
Its a new year and its time to overhaul my web site. Here are the things I know I need to do:
Overall design: Need a new visual scheme; new background, new font, text colors, Those kinds of things
Front page: I need two main things here, First is an about me statement and second is a picture of me. The site is supposed to be about me and has no picture of me? How did I miss that?
Reworking my resume.
getting screenshots for all of my videos and better descriptions about the design process for each game.
Changing the layouts of the animation and art pages.
New layout of my writings with small exerts from each.
Overhaul of my linkedin profile.
And finally I need to do more tweeting about my work (and in general really).
Giant Update
It has been far too long since I updated this….. oops.
Well I started a new project to build on my Macro work: Neo Ipsum!
Neo Ipsum is an Add-in that checks a presentation for empty placeholders and adds Lorem Ipsum Text. It also has a few variants for the Lorem Ipsums.
So what is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is Latin text placed in a presentation to simulate a filled presentation without having actual data to fill it with. This allows for a presenter to show what the presentation will look like without the audience being distracted by what is written in the presentation.
So what’s new for the project? I HAVE BETA! The Beta version is up and has been sent to a select group of people for testing.
Assuming the testers don’t find anything that requires major work I should have the full version one in a few weeks.
PowerPoint Macro Development
One week in to learning to make PowerPoint Macros I feel I have learned a lot. First I decided to start development in PowerPoint itself as my development environment. I came to this decision after two fruitless days of trying to get Visual Studio to work. I have learned that PowerPoint itself is a fine development environment for Macros.
Most of what I have done so far is very basic stuff such as deleting all the empty text boxes in a presentation, adding slides with layouts and text, adding text-boxes with text, and adding text to existing text-boxes. Now I am working on a dialog window that will ask the user what slide they want a new Text box on and then place that text box.
Starting Power Point Add-ins: Development Space
The first step when figuring out a new programming language or method is usually to make a “hello world” type program and confirm it is working. Next you add in some more complex features until you are comfortable and can move on to real development.
I have often made the mistake of skipping this step. But this time I am not going to make that mistake… assuming I can get the development space to work. Specifically Visual Studio. I can’t seam to figure out how to get it to make a project for Microsoft Office applications. I have a few avenues of exploration to try and failing those I have an excellent mentor or two that can help me. I just was hoping I would need the help in the learning to run stage not the learning what my hands are stage.
Updating my Website
My Magic Life Counter app is now up on my website for download in the Projects section: https://justinbret.com/Projects.htm
In addition I am starting a few other updates to the website. I am working on adding screen shots to my game projects and to the entry for the Life Counter app. I am also considering several restructurings to the website, mostly in how my various projects are stored. Some of the ideas are to divide it up by what platform it is aiming at, another possibility is to give each project its own page and have a directory to them. I will be experimenting with these ideas for the next week or so.