Any news or progress on forthcoming releases shall be posted here as shall requests for royalty free resources where needed.
Chatsworth House *
Work on gathering material for an Historic Buildings app has already begun. It shall use the existing framework already developed with one exterior and one interior image per site. Hyperlinks to Wikipedia and to their respective websites shall also be included.
Its initial release shall primarily comprise stately homes but other categories such as castles shall follow. Attention however shall first be turned to releasing the skeleton part of the following Human Body app.
As a family member of the National Trust, my granddaughter loves her visits to historic sites. It never ceases to amaze how much she gleans and can recount from just one visit. It is to this end that I hope to surprise her with an app that links to further information. Whether or not she learns of it here is yet to be seen.
Coincidentally the father of one of her best friends was working on the restoration of Chatsworth House when they met at primary school. It should be noted that Chatsworth is not a National Trust site.
I don't regard foreign language support particularly urgent for free apps, although I have considered it a long term goal in French, German and Spanish. Should that day arrive apps would most likely be hosted at my .com domain.
Now that the Option List includes an identfier with each item, tests will work when translated in your browser, although the list itself does remain in English language order.
Browsers behave differently such that you may need to scroll through the full Option List for translation before typing or after changing mode or continent. The list itself can always be used for selection instead.
For best results, select the mode, continent and test options you wish before translation. You will need to scroll through the Option List in some browsers before it is fully translated.
You are now ready to perform tests in your chosen language.
Special or Unicode characters can also cause difficulty when typing on a computer with an English keyboard, the umlaut in Österreich for example. Some German speakers may be familiar with the Alt + 0214 key code, so numerals are no longer excluded to facilitate such input.
As currently implemented the Option List is reloaded more often than need be, something that shall be addressed soon. Any progress on this matter shall be posted here.
Coming soon is an app on the human body. Gathering and editing suitable images however is time-consuming and difficult to find. I have collated enough for what will become its preliminary release for the skeleton, but there is more that may be covered.
What I envisage includes major blood vessels, muscles and nerves perhaps. There are insufficient organs for a category of their own but with the addition of glands there could be.
Finding suitable royalty free images that can be edited with highlights for tuition or test purposes is no simple task. If anybody knows of or has any such material, I would greatly appreciate your assistance. Ideally they should include full body images plus more detailed views.
One of the input fields is disabled in the images above, possibly due to changes during development, so please appreciate that they are only provided for illustrative purposes.
The Option List was developed because standard datalist type web elements were unsatifactory when used with the virtual keyboard on Android devices. It has thus far only been implemented to meet the immediate requirements of the World Flags and associated apps but could be refined and packaged as a web component.
In its current form it largely mirrors the functionality of the Microsoft Windows ComboBox, autocompletion, sorted or unsorted, limited to list items or not, with or without the drop down list that can be activated by clicking the input field. I don't feel compelled to add the small button as it isn't really necessary. It also comprises a disallowed character facility.
Possibly the most notable addition is its abbreviation facility, which can be used for any other input, product codes for example, something I would most certainly have used during my working life had it been available. It took a twelve year old asking for abbreviations to become a reality. Also included is a typo correction facility when limited to list.
More information can be gleaned from the World Flags instructions page plus of course it can be tried in any of the apps on this site. If requested it could be packaged as a web component. As for the Microsoft ComboBox, maybe I could subclass it to also accept abbreviations; something for another day perhaps.
* The above image of Chatsworth House has been cropped from a 2014 original by Gareth Williams.
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