Lots of cool and interesting things have happened in the past week or so. I got an iPod Classic (at the last minute, I decided against the Touch). I’m totally loving it. I love being able to finally watch videos. I’ve got a nice 80 gb black one that I can watch episodes of The Office on. I’m so completely happy. I’m also getting my Wacom Bamboo in February. Really excited about that as well.

So while I was gone, I had my birthday. Yes, I’m now 21. I’m officially old-as-hell on RSBANDB. Oh, I just realised that there’s still some cake in the refrigerator. Mmm, much better. As I was saying, I feel old now. I’m going to end up being one of those women who hangs about here age after 30.

Awesome RuneWire Updates

Shane released the PM system while I was away. Everything just looks so good. I told him that I need to disappear more often since he seems to work better without me Another update-in-progress is going on with the client that Jeff’s developing. I’m currently testing it and it has the foundation almost done, but it needs a lot of work.

The client, when it’s released, will be updated in several semi-frequent updates. Right now, it’s only being developed with basic functions (posting, image uploading, options, and window transparency). I’m really excited about the client, to say the least. When it comes out, it’ll be running on AIR (so you’ll have to download it before installing the client). I see a lot of good things to come with the client and RW itself. I’m thinking that there will be user versatility with creating add-ons or skins for the client, and I really hope that this takes off because of that.

Right now though, everyone’s working hard on furthering the development of RuneWire so stay tuned. :}

It’s been a while, I know. Shane, Jeff, and I haven’t forgotten about RuneWire though. Jeff gave me the green light to begin further designs on the client. Looks like we’ll be able to utilise AIR for it and that makes me über excited. I’ve updated the design and fixed a lot of accessibility issues that existed previously. Though, I NEED your input on it. It always helps to have a second (third, fourth, FIFTH?) pair of eyes looking at this and telling me where the design might cause problems for users. If you can do that fully and courteously, I’d be glad to look into your feedback.

In other RW news, Shane (when he finishes midterms next week) will be implementing a PM system. I’m really happy about that. I’ve been heavily pushing a group system on RuneWire, but that will come much later, so don’t hold your breath. Right now, a few things need to be worked on. Mainly, I want to see a better notification system so that you can see when friends add you, PM you, reply to your posts, etc. Also, Anubis suggested a to-do list and that should be added too. I hope you guys find these things helpful (if you’re a RW member, that is).

Here are the design drafts of the client.

Login:

Main Client:

Image Uploader:

Settings menu: *Known issue: Opacity level should be changed to “Window Opacity Level”.

Notification box: *Will notify user of PMs, Friend adds, and Mini-blog replies.

This took me quite a long time to put together! It’s so hard designing a small client that won’t get in the way of your RS playing! If you have any feedback at all, feel free to comment on here.

PS: This blog is now running on WordPress 2.3 and I have tags now (instead of categories). I love the new version and many thanks to Jeff for sorting everything out for me!

Well, I took some of the criticisms to heart. Believe it or not, I’m a person who has feelings and logging on after a really long day to someone calling me a “c**t” wasn’t really something that brightened my day. I’m all for freedom of speech and, frankly, I don’t care about who said it and why. I’ve decided to improve on these criticisms.

So I put my mind to work and I came up with this.

Lately, I’ve been designing a lot of far-into-the-future features for RuneWire. Yesterday, I designed badges that will pull the RSS feed from your RuneWire account and stick it on a nice little image for you to display elsewhere. I’m going to be putting them into sig form soon enough. They’re likely going to be released after we leave beta testing. So, it’s not too far off! Here are the samples.

Here comes the head of a pin part now. I’ve been putting together a design for the client. I had to make it small enough to fit in the corner of your screen while playing, while still including features that you need to use to upload screenshots and such. If there are any other designers who are reading this who can give me any feedback, please do! I’m all for learning new things. What I have so far:

Let me explain this a little for you all. The image uploader is hidden until you click the “>>” (Add Screenshot will be the alt text of the >> button) button. Then, it slides up and you navigate to the file you wish to upload, then click “Go”. The conformation or denial pops up in the uploader box when the file is/isn’t uploaded. This will all be developed in AIR, but we’re waiting for that to go into Beta 2. Cool? Uncool? I think it’s a nice idea. It’d be really cool if RuneWire became really popular, and we could integrate this into a larger RuneScape client that’s already out there. It really depends.

So, it’s finally up! We’ve spent a few months working on RuneWire and I’m so happy to see it out. It all started out one evening when Shane and I were talking about ways in which we could expand the RS community. I didn’t want something that would conceivably bring an onslaught of people to our forums, I wanted something that created two communities in one. I used to be an avid user of Twitter and Jaiku, but I lost interest because I felt that what I ate for lunch was not significant content.

I figured that if a group of people had a common interest (Runescape), then it would be possible to bring more people together toward an actual purpose. With RuneWire, people could reach out to each other and relate more easily. My idea of what RuneWire would be was actually really basic compared to what it’s going to be. When all of us put our heads together, we though up so many awesome features that will be arriving soon. Without Shane to do the entire back-end work and Jeff to do the CSS, this never could have happened. So thank you, guys.

I wanted to sort of shed light on what you can expect from RuneWire in future, but I do not want to completely “spill the beans”. You can look forward to a really awesome group system which will allow you to do things that aren’t quite possible on most forums and blogs. That’s all I can say for now.

Now, go sign up for Beta testing and add “extremewench” as a friend

Get it while it’s hot, applications for beta testers are coming soon.

(Yes, I like being mysterious)