Loci Desktop Posts

7 posts tagged with loci-desktop

Locidesktop was my coffee shop coding project of last year. I was quite pleased with the results. Locidesktop.com has been happily serving link desktops to some loyal visitors for months now – with no maintenance required on my part (a good thing because I've been busy with other projects). continue reading…

So what to do with locidesktop.com? It's a desktop-like website bookmarking tool – if you haven't seen it, take a quick look at this example desktop.

I built Loci Desktop a few months ago and promoted it on a few geek sites. It's been running ever since, with no maintenance from myself, happily serving up start pages to a small number of regular users. There was a buzz when I promoted it, people were largely impressed, some were indifferent, but few ended up using it regularly. So now I'm left with a quandary.

I could try and promote it. But to what end? It's not like I need a certain number of visitors to cover the hosting. I'm using the same VPS as I am for my blog, and I designed Locidesktop to be ultra-low bandwidth anyway – so it effectively costs me nothing to run. continue reading…

I implemented a theme system for locidesktop.com and thought it only fitting that the first theme I made was one for Django.

I present you with the Django themed Loci Desktop!

Here it is, in embedded form – although you really need to click the above link to fully appreciate it.

I have been busy working on locidesktop.com lately. One popular feature request from the beta testing was to use website favicons, so that links become more readily identifiable – which I have implemented after several late nights, and abusing my quad core.

A few of the 3D Favicons used in locidesktop.com

I built a pipeline that downloads favicons, extracts PNGs which are then processed in to a 3D scene and rendered for missing resolutions (.ICO files can contain multiple resolutions). I've tweaked the way that the 3D icons are produced, and they are significantly better than my first attempt – although some do come out better than others. continue reading…

The feedback I recieved from Reddit about locidesktop.com (my hobby project) was encouraging.

If you would like to join the beta program for locidesktop, please leave a comment below…

One of the comments pointed out that although there is a large choice of icons available, there isn't always a clear recognizable image for each site, and it would be nice if locidesktop would use ‘favicons’. I had considered using favicons previously, but rejected the idea because they are just 16x16 pixels in size, and I wanted to use large images for icons. continue reading…

My latests hobby-project has been pushed live, in invite-only beta form. Previously known as Links Desktop, I have now dubbed it Loci Desktop, after the Loci Method.

Auto-complete in Loci Desktop

One feature of Loci Desktop is that it will auto-complete URLs when you add new icons to your ‘desktop’. Auto-complete is one of those features that users expect these days. They want the app to figure out what they want with as few key-presses as possible – and quite rightly so, typing is such a chore!

The auto-complete system for Loci Desktop, in its initial state, was straight-forward to implement. The javascript and front-end was the most time-consuming part of the job, but the back-end Python code was trivial. continue reading…

In past blogs I've hinted on the fact that I'm working on a Javascript application in my spare time. It's not quite done yet, and wont be live for a few more weeks, but I do have something that I can show off.

This project is best explained in the form of a screencast. This is the first screencast I have ever made and I'm not sure if I have done it right, or if my humble server will cope with serving FLV files. If the server doesn't manage to keep up, I'll probably Youtube it.

Update: If for any reason the above player doesn't work, you can view the screencast on Youtube. continue reading…