Sprint 9

This past week incorporated A LOT of changes. With the showcase approaching fast, many changes needed to be made and functionality is starting to get added very quickly.

1. Images were added to all of the timeline, with similar structure throughout the entire timeline. This incorporates the ability to add a caption, with the only thing still needing to be added for this being a credit for the media.
2. After a critique in class, we determined it was confusing to know where to click so I spent some time looking at what should have what cursor and making it that cursor with css.
3. Another constructive piece of criticism I received was to have the keys color coded with colors that are shown first on the title slide. I programmed this into the application as I felt that this solution made the key area more manageable and while still keeping the functionality simple for the user.
4. I spoke last sprint about adding functionality to allow as many different stakeholders as of interest by the journalist. This sprint I focused on making this a reality by adjusting a lot of the functions to incorporate the ability for this to happen.
5. Going off of the criticisms from class again, the design of the timeline changed a lot. Last sprint I came up with the idea to allow users to minimize and maximize the timeline and this sprint I believe I gave that functionality a better user experience. The axis and events start shown however the key and the actual facts start hidden. When a user clicks a small button with an ellipses, the rest of the application is shown for full use.
6. The format of the data coming in is extremely important so I spent some time going over the formatting of the google sheet that users are going to be using to generate the timeline.
7. One functionality that was extremely crucial was the ability to create a chronology of events regardless of where the event is located on the spreadsheet. For example if an event took place in 2010, however it is the third event and the second event took place in 2008, then the application should be able to catch that and make sure that event is then put in the right place. This functionality involved creating an array of objects and then sorting it by the year in the start_date.
8. This last part was also partly connected with what would happen if two events happened on the same year. Since currently the timeline is only working based on year, this had to remedied. What I decided to do to handle this was to make a popup so that if multiples events happened on one year, then it will popup and allow you to address those events individually. This part was particularly hard as I had to restructure a lot of the functions to incorporate a new formatting of json.

One more medium post to go and the clock is ticking for the showcase on April 28th.