Two on Two: 2 Gadgets for 2nd Milestone

For our second milestone, our group has finished two gadgets. The Stoplight gadget, which is a universal gadget that takes a user input source and displays a stoplight image based on the a given threshold, and the Wattdepot-ui-monitorgadget, which is a monitor that connects to the Wattdepot web service and displays the power/energy consumed and the power/energy generated of a given source.

Stoplight Gadget

Features

• Automatic refresh
• Title feature
• Customizable image size
• Able to parse both integers and decimal values
  
• Error handling

Version 1.7 is the latest version of stoplight gadget. The most prominent feature of this version is the automatic refresh is much cleaner. During our meeting with Prof. Johnson, he noticed that our gadget will look a little more professional if our gadget refreshes only the relevant and dynamic information. As in the case for our stoplight gadget, the image, data and the message. These dynamic information will only refresh whenever the image or the data changes and the rest will stay the same . This means that we don't have to refresh all the information whenever one changes. It also eliminates the spinner icon for each information, which appears when the gadget retrieves data. Other functions include the adjustment of the gadget height. This was an aesthetic modification because our gadget allows users to change the image size and when the image is set to small there are extra whitespace below the message. Lastly, we changed the location of the gadget title from the gadget window itself to the top center section of the gadget main display frame.
For the full list of all the features visit our ReleaseNotes wiki.


Wattdepot-ui-monitorgadget

Features

• Automatic refresh
• Able to connect to Wattdepot web service
  
• Error handling

For our latest version of the Wattdepot monitor, we also implemented the new refresh function explained in the Stoplight section above. This feature is much more prominent in the Wattdepot monitor since each of the information displayed is a result of the retrieval of the proper data to be displayed. From the source name to the last checked time stamp, the spinner icon always shows up for each information displayed which turned out to be an eye sore. For the my milestone contribution, I added the error messages to be displayed as part of my error handling. One of the problems I encountered is the appearance of the spinner icon along with my error messages. This gives the user a false sense of anticipation for more information to show up. The solution to the problem is the implementation of the new refresh function itself. Since my error message is due to a missing user input, other information that needs to be displayed might be dependent to the missing input and therefore will show the spinner icon to no effect.
Since we only worked on the Wattdepot monitor for only a month, we only have 2 versions being version 1.2 as the latest.

After the 2nd milestone presentation, we are to change our group project for the second half of the semester. We had a chance to change project after the 1st milestone but I enjoyed creating gadgets that I stayed in this project. The group isn't decided yet but this is the reason why I signed up for the HEEP gadget team for the 3rd milestone.