Week 1 (June 9th)

This was my first week at Carnegie Mellon. I spent time getting settled in the house and in Pittsburgh. I also filled out the paperwork for my CMU student ID card (exciting!), my CMU wireless connection and meeting with the many students and professors working on the footprints project.

I started some work on the google module for the stepgreen application. I had been familiarized with creating google gadgets this past semester in a google gadget workshop, but I had to refresh my memory and go over some examples to understand how stepgreen can be integrated into a gadget. My goal was to create a simple gadget that would contain the flash from the facebook or myspace application so the flash code wouldn't need to be revisited for google. This would also help keeping the applications consistent and make the programming task much more manageable.

I encountered a large problem when I realized that google gadgets are constrained by width, the iGoogle homepage is divided into three columns among which gadgets can be arranged. To maintain this layout, a gadget's width is determined by the width of the column. The flash applications were much too large to fit in the gadget and I thought this was going to be much more cumbersome than it should be.

Since I couldn't continue the gadget until I met with my mentor and the students, I worked on this website and on understanding the usability study we will be conducting in July.