Chat Projects

bpChat
One of the features of bradsproject (mentioned in my previous post) was a simple little chat room. It was originally just one of the dozens of features I wanted to make just to see if I could, but people started to like it. It started to get use regularly. So I started spending more time on it, and made the code and functionality better and better.
I then decided to try and enter the world of Android development by creating an Android app that could interact with the bradsproject chat room.
bpChat Android App

Now, of course mostly just a couple of friends of mine and I use this, but it's still a fun toy.

Eventually, after the death of bradsproject, I separated the code out into its own entity. Now it has a separate online presence.
bpChat



bpIM
After the code from the chat room had been improved a great deal, I started looking into more convenient ways for the members of bradsproject to interact. I started working on an instant messaging bar, similar to what Facebook used to have. I eventually had a very nice chat bar on every page of the website. It worked well, it worked fast, and it was fun to use. I worked very hard on it, and it was my proudest feature of bradsproject.
Unfortunately I don't still have a screenshot of this in action. Some of my screen shots disappeared when the hosting company I used to use had the machine I was on fail.

An important part of this (as well as all of bradsproject) is that I very stubbornly refused to use any libraries or frameworks. I insisted on building everything from scratch. It didn't seem as fun to hobble a few pieces together into a working system that I didn't know much about. By building it myself, I knew how each and every part of the system worked. It's not the fastest way to do something, but I learned a lot more doing it that way, and the system feels more like its mine.

Stranger Chat
This was mainly just done out of curiosity. It's just a chat room you can use without registering or logging in to anything. You are assigned an ID when you go to the web page, and you chat as that. It's a little buggy, but it's produced some entertaining results from time to time.

In my next post I'll probably be talking about some of my smaller projects. Some are just proof-of-concept, and some are simply entertaining to watch. Now I'm just hoping I can locate them all...