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Showing posts from September, 2009

New Solution for Selecting Locations

As the date of New Lunarium becoming public approaches, I am concentrating on the most essential functionality, leaving cosmetic polishing for a later stage. A number of volunteers has tested the solution for selecting locations on the Earth based on Google Maps, and most of them told me that although it is very flexible, too many steps are needed to select a location. Most people would prefer the old solution where a city can be selected from a drop-down box. Well, the old solution was good for a limited number of locations only, while I am constantly receiving requests to add more and more cities. I wanted to find a solution that would involve as few steps as possible, like the old drop-down box, while at the same time provided the flexibility of Google Maps. And here is what I decided to do. There will be two pages, one of them very simple, named Settings, the other one is Location, with Google Maps but redesigned to make it simpler. The Settings page will offer two drop-down boxes:

Runic Oracle is updated

I have finally updated the iPhone / iPod touch version of my simple program for Runic divination named Runic Oracle. A small but annoying problem with animation was fixed and memory management was enhanced to eliminate occasional crashes. Still trying to submit the update to Apple - there seems to be some problem with their site - and then it will probably take a couple of weeks for them to approve the update. But everyone who has purchased the Runic Oracle for the massive price of $0.99 will get the updates automatically, as soon as they are approved. The screenshots of the program can be seen here but they don't show you what I believe is the most attractive feature of this program - its animations. The texts are also quite good, I believe. I have written them many years ago for a UK Runic phone line.

Beginning the Astro School

Thanks to the awfulness of Sky Broadband I was left without an Internet connection for two weeks - what a pain! I hope my new provider will be more professional. I still did some work on New Lunarium though. The Moon Sign Calculator is completed - except of some smaller details which I am leaving here and there for the final polishing stage. And I have started to write the texts for the Free Astro School which is going to be a major feature of the New Lunarium. An introduction that relates about the author and how the idea of a free online astrology school has developed is already completed, and I am now writing the first lesson. If anybody will wish to preview the texts before they go public and tell me if they are comprehensible enough, that will be great. I have put for myself a deadline of the 20th of October to make the New Lunarium public. Most of the work that is left is bits and pieces here and there, plus adding a number of descriptive texts for different features.

Planning the New Moon Sign Calculator

Hey, it is already September! And New Lunarium still isn't open to the public! I need to think about priorities... There are many valuable pages that can be added without too much effort, but the main priority should be to open the new site - and then I can keep adding new pages forever. To open the new site, I need to reproduce those features that already exist on the old Lunarium, and the last missing dynamic feature is the Moon Sign Calculator. And as with all the other features, I want to not just reproduce the existing functionality but to go one or two steps further. With the Moon Sign Calculator, I want to add the following: 1) Warn is the Moon is in the very last or very first degrees of a sign, in which case the influence of the adjacent sign can be quite noticeable. 2) List any precise aspects that the Moon has with planets. They can modify the Moon's manifestations quite a bit. Also give brief descriptions of these aspects. 3) Give a list of celebrities and other peo