And finally motion pictures!

Two and a half years ago I began this journey as a budding engineer. At that time I thought that I would study hard, get a great campus placement and will walk off with a million dollar job. As time passed by things changed. This would be engineer turned into a graphic artist - then a software developer - then a web developer - and finally a film producer! It's along and difficult journey ahead. Lets see where it leads me to.

Being a film producer and managing your own production house is a pretty tough job. But again anything can be done for quality script, quality music and a quality motion picture. I never dream of making it to the Oscars, but yes, I do dream of producing a few quality movies! It is a difficult journey ahead, but as said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

On the 26th of March, 2013, I finally started my own "F-wing Production House" and started working on my first movie - "Deeds not Words". This will be a short movie and will be released sometime this summer!

Take a look at the official trailer of my first movie - "Deeds not Words"

Link: http://youtu.be/kDRbYG6EBj0

Follow us on our facebook page -

https://www.facebook.com/FWingProductionHouse

Back in 3D

After a really long break from blogging, I'm back on the eve of my semester exams. Things got really catchy as I was bored with web design and decided to take some time off it. Meanwhile I did do something new. :) I concentrated on 3D design, not just any 3D design but real time automobile modelling. Being a mechanical engineer, it was a hell lot interesting and surprisingly some of the subjects in my course, especially CAD/CAM, helped me a lot (I didn't expect them to). After a lot of hard work, research and practice I came up with good models of the Lamborghini Murcialago SV and Ferrari 458 Italia. I worked them in Cinema4D and put don the finishing touch in Photoshop. Although the photoshopping was just to put a few filters to enhance the colours.

 Well, it would have been much easier if I did these in Maya, but I'm well suited to the C4D environment. It's really easy and you do get quite a lot of handy tutorials online that will help you to get through with the HyperNURBS and Wireframe designing (believe me, these are the tough parts of designing, material designing and lighting is a lot simpler). If you are new to 3D modelling, you can check out C4Dcafe and other websites for some really cool plugins and tutorials. These include both animations and still image designing and the important part - rendering.

If you are interested in getting the source files of these models, just send me a mail at amitdatta1806082599@gmail.com

Vacation Tracker on Android - LungoJs

After hanging around a lot with PHP and CSS, development of web apps for PC's got somewhat monotonous. Hence, I decided to move on to develops web apps for the tablet and the smart phones. Being the possessor of a Sony Xperia U, Android was the obvious choice of platform. Instead of hard coding the entire application with javaScript I decided to use the framework called LungoJs. The first look at the framework convinced me that it is definitely cool, but lack of documentation and support made it really cumbersome. It took a hell lot of time for me to figure out how to use the Framework. At this point I must tell you that it is not at all that tough as I felt, its just the lack of support.  
 The application itself is very simple. The routine is stored in a MySQL database. All I need to do is to update the routine if I'm absent in a particular class. The absent dates are stored in the database. The application automatically calculates the percentage of classes I have attended in each subject and warns me if I'm low on attendance.

The application is currently in alpha stage of development and major features have already been implemented. The last module that I'm working on is trying out a algorithm that will help me to plan my classes so that I can cope up if I'm low on attendance. A bit of AI ;)

Taskware

Finally my first corporate based application reaches testing phase. Taskware, as it is being called, is an advanced task management application that synchronizes all your tasks, projects, contacts and notes over the network. The thing that really makes it different from other task management softwares is that every part of information can be shared over the network with someone if necessary. Few additional features that makes this application special is its cloud storage - file sharing system, the internal messaging system and the accumulation of contacts sensibly. Security has also been taken ample care off, as corporate solutions always require neck tight security.
I'm looking forward to the results of the first real time test of Taskware over the National Institute of Technology Durgapur servers somewhere in the near future.

The Taskware Dashboard

Client side validation vs Server side validation

It is quite a fun developing a web application this summer for NITD Alumni. Working at such a professional level is tough, but it definitely teaches you plenty of new stuff.

While working on this project I came across a major problem with validation. Since the application is supposed to store profiles of alumni's and present students, we need a lot of validation work. Any wrong data will make the database useless, and also we want to put the best user experience forward. So the idea is to give the user the least number of controls and still collect the most amount of data possible.

Initially, I decided to use client side validation using javascript as that would speed up the process as well provide an enhanced user experience. But how much I tried, javascript was easy to hack and anyone could submit garbage data into the form. So finally it was decided to do server side validation using PHP.

Now to make our plans, we did both client side and server side validation. The obvious question is how will this help! Well the client side validation does most of the work, make the interface fast to use and gives a superior user interface. On the other hand the server side code gives a secure backend. So the before the data is written onto the database, the server side validation makes it foolproof and writes it down.

Hence, for a site to work out proper and secure validation techniques, it needs to have both client side and server side validation.

P.S. For those of you looking for client side validation, look out for the jquery.validate.js and additional-methods.js. They contain almost all the necessary validations. And obviously you can write down a few of your own. :)

300 not out

Coding and web design has always been my strengths, but another favourite hobby of mine has been to make posters. After coming over to college this hobby turned into a passion. Clubs and communities helped me flourish and gave me ample oppurtunity to learn. They allowed me to commit mistakes, learn from them and then rectify them. After designing for more than 14 months, finally I've completed making 300 posters in this college. It has been a tough journey but it was a whole lot of experience which not only improved my skills but also increased my level of artistic ideas. Election posters to promotion posters, I've done it all. Certificates, ID cards, flyers and flexes. These brought a whole lot of versatility in me making me adapt to different situation. I also designed 4 brochures meanwhile - 4 full fledged books. It was an amazing journey and it is to continue.

WYSIWYG Editor: Planned!!

Finally 'm working on the WYSIWYG editor that I had planned to do a while ago. All the development stages are almost planned. Research work almost done. And I'm ready to code for it!

The development stages:

• The most basic functionality that a WYSIWYG editor has is the styling, alignment and font options. So for the editor I'm working on, I assume it to be the most important options and hence I put them on stage 1 of my development process. Along with these hyperlinks and inserting images will also be a part of this stage. Font-colors, backgrounds and highlighting will also be taken care of. Indentation was a problem, but with a bit of research this problem was also sorted out.
• The second stage will consist of advanced options like bullets, numbering, emoticons, symbols and date/time options. This stage specifically focuses on options that are less commonly used by editors although they form an integral part of our compositions. More specifically they add feel to it.
• The third and final stage will be to add editing options for most advanced editors. Options like inserting HTML snippets will be available. Tables and grids will also be taken care of. Advanced numbering and bullet systems will be introduced. Layout manager will be introduced. So that the user can make use of common default templates instead of wasting time on making their own.

All these changes are made by applying the changes to the HTML form of the text written in the textarea. This ensures easy portability of the edited content. Hence this can be applied as a web editor in different CMS' like drupal and joomla, or in blog editors or in mail composers were mails can be sent by the alternate mime type.