This post is a bit over­due con­sid­er­ing the project for which I did this was com­pleted months ago. I finally got around to doc­u­ment­ing it. Magento’s prod­uct list view lets cus­tomers add prod­ucts to the shop­ping cart one at a time. The client wanted cus­tomers to be able to add mul­ti­ple prod­ucts to the shop­ping cart simul­ta­ne­ously. Given the time con­straints for the projects, I cre­ated an ad hoc AJAX method to accom­plish this fea­ture request.

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I finally got around to spin­ning off MyGoogle­Cal as a sep­a­rate web­site. I opted to rename the script to RESTYLEgc to avoid step­ping on Google’s toes. It was some­thing that’s been ges­tat­ing over the past year. I com­pleted the site over the hol­i­day week­end since I had the time avail­able. The new site is at www.restylegc.com. I’m also host­ing the script at Google Code, and I even added a Google Group to facil­i­tate dis­cus­sions. After see­ing the com­ments top 100, I real­ize a blog really isn’t suit­able for lengthy dis­cus­sions. Hope­fully, the forum and wiki fea­tures will be bet­ter for the end-user.

I updated MyGoogleCal4 with a small bug­fix this week­end as well. That will be the last update. Future devel­op­ment will con­tinue with RESTYLEgc. Since the code was orig­i­nally pub­lic domain, I opted to go with an MIT open source license. I also got the code in a Sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory which I should’ve done a long time ago. With the Issues tab at Google Code, I can bet­ter track and encour­age bug reports and fea­ture requests.

The code is still free, but paid sup­port is avail­able. I’ve also got some other ideas of where I want to take the site. So stay tuned!

Magento, an open-source PHP ecom­merce solu­tion, has a very com­pre­hen­sive fea­ture list. How­ever, its built-in CMS doesn’t sup­port hier­ar­chi­cal pages. You can fake it, though.

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I finally got around to down­load­ing the iPhone SDK to see what I can do with it. Since I’ve dab­bled in game devel­op­ment back when I worked with Flash and Direc­tor, I fig­ured I’d see what I can do with the iPhone. I wanted to start with a frame­work and I looked at Torque and Unity. Though inex­pen­sive by game engine stan­dards, dur­ing a reces­sion­ary time of cost cut­ting, it’s hard to val­i­date a nearly $1000 pur­chase, espe­cially if you don’t know yet if that invest­ment would pay off. So I finally set­tled on the cocos2d-iphone frame­work which is based on the cocos2d frame­work for Python. There is lit­tle to no doc­u­men­ta­tion, so be pre­pared to read source code. Mon­o­cle Studio’s whitepa­per will def­i­nitely help you boot­strap your project. In the spirit of that paper, I thought I’d share my trans­la­tion of the cocos2d “Hello, World” exam­ple adapted for the cocos2d-iphone framework.

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