I'm trying to get my head around writing in a Model-View-Controller kind of a way. I understand conceptually. I get it. The model holds the data. The view represents that data. The controller controls the interactions with the model. Great. I even sort of see why PureMVC might want to use singletons for the model, view and controller. I mean, you don't want to accidentally have multiple models flying around, do you?

But practically? WTF?

I'll get there. I just need to work through some examples I think. At the moment I've leapt right in at the deep end with a multi-class model, a complex multi-view thing, and not really much idea how the controller is going to work.

Still, it's good fun, in a slightly weird sort of way... :-)  

(This is loosely related to the post about the pump. I will explain. Honest. Soon.) 

For a while now I've been using Brighton's many buses to get me around. Mostly as a side-effect of getting a bus pass through work and failing to deal with the wind and hills combo on my bike.

At the larger bus stops, they have those big signs telling you how long to the next bus. They display about the next 4-5 buses, with the bus number and the time to wait. Unfortunately I've found them to be incredibly unreliable. Either a bus appears out of nowhere, unannounced (actually a good scenario) or the time ticks down, the bus says 'due', then disappears off the list without actually ever arriving. Also 10 minutes of bus sign time is not the same as 10 minutes of watch time. It's a elastic thing. It's not normally until it says about 2 min to go that you can actually trust it. I know, it's the traffic etc.

I've had this idea kicking around about how great it would be if you could provide information about where buses are in real time on a mobile-enabled website. Seriously, I spend so long playing around on my phone waiting at bus stops, it would be great. I could make a decision about whether to walk to the next stop, or go buy that pint of milk we need, rather than just sort of hope.

Well, that dream may just be a step closer. In London, anyway. And only a step, because it doesn't look like they are going to make the data publicly available through a nice api. Still, baby steps...

Monday I toddled off up to London to go to the Colin Moock's Actionscript 3.0 tour: From the Ground Up.

A very early start (for me) saw me on the 7.33 train up to London Bridge. Prime commuter time, so it was packed! But I got a seat, and I'd treated myself to a coffee, so all was good. And I even got one of the papers read for my seminar on Thursday. Perfect.

The event was held at Vineopolis which was amazing!  They have some photos on their site. Big old vaulted ceilings everywhere, and some really cool

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I went to an interesting event last night. A skillswap event, entitled Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World. I will admit I was absolutely wiped out and barely coherent, so I was not at my most receptive, but still worth going along.

Rather than static wireframes as I know them, it was all about using some really basic HTML, CSS and Javascript (JQuery) to knock together some stuff to prototype a user interface and the basic interactions. It's really relevant to what I'm doing at work at the moment (I know, I never talk about work, it says so in my about blurb.

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One of my courses this term (Interactive Learning Environments - there will be a category in the University section soon) is based in Second Life, so I joined up around Christmas time.

I have to say, I don't really get it. To me it feels like a chat room with images, and I never really got into chat rooms. But it raises some really interesting questions. Let's start with the avatars. Mine has purple spiky hair, bright green eyes, and is substantially more toned than me. I admit that there's some wish-fulfillment going on there, and I don't think I'm the only one doing that. I don't think everyone is, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's an interesting thing.

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