Friday, May 29, 2009

looking good

The team has been very hard at work parsing Gmail. The major problem is that Google doesn't seem to want anybody to have access to their own Gtalk Chat archives, which is unfortunate and very troublesome.

Still, Jeremy and Nick are doing their best. It's possible that both projects may have to use whatever chats we can get with the caveat that many chats are simply not accessible.

We are hoping that parsing the Gmail will be easier since Google allows for IMAP. (Even when you use IMAP, it will NOT download your chats!)

We are making progress!

Friday, May 22, 2009

Summer 2009 Schedule

Summer 2009 Schedule for Gcomic and Ggame
5/4 Week 1: Create program requirements
5/11 Week 2: Begin parsing Gmail (email/IM)
5/18 Week 3: Finish parsing (Hopefully)
5/25 Week 4: Ggame prototype complete
6/1 Week 5: begin Gcomic prototype
6/8 Week 6: Work with artist on Gcomic panels
6/15 Week 7: keep tweaking Gcomic art
6/22 Week 8: Ggame testing and tweaking
6/29 Week 9: Ggame debug and test
7/6 Week 10: See if we can connect Game/comic to other services, i.e., Yahoo! (maybe)
7/13 Week 11: debug
7/20 Week 12: test with users
7/27 Week 13: get user results back
8/3 Week 14: tweak code and advertise to get others to build upon our source.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Welcome

Greetings!
This blog will post weekly updates for two open-source projects funded by the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software.

The project members are Jason Zalinger, Jeremy Therrin and Nick Glickenhouse.

The two projects are Gmail as Video Game (Ggame) and Gmail as Comic Strip (Gcomic).

Ggame is a "game" meant to encourage exploration and self-reflection about your Gmail archives.  The game will log into your Gmail account and as the player wanders from space to space, he or she will encounter other "characters" from your past and engage in dialouges with them.  All the "data" comes from either Gmail emails or Gmail chats.

Gcomic is essentially the same idea except it exports your "data" in the form of a comic strip.

Each week, we will post updates on our progress and eventually we hope lots and lots of people will build on this work and use the programs to help them visualize their digital archives in a narrative form.