Kelan Champagne (http://yeahrightkeller.com)
WikiWalker is a screensaver that wanders through Wikipedia with a zoom/pan/fade effect. It starts on the Life (disambiguation) page, and picks random links on each page to follow. If you're lucky it might head towards the Meaning of life page, and then, who knows...
This was my entry to ironcoder5 which was the screensaver API, and the theme was "life". I made a screen-saver that starts at the Wikipedia page for Life (disambiguation) and then follows random links to walk a path through wikipedia. For each page it renders the content and does a zoom/pan/fade effect.
The entry that I submitted was pretty rough around the edges (and in the middle too). It crashes whenever there were 2 instances of it running, which would happen if you were looking at the preview in the Screen Saver Pref Pane and then pressed "test now". This happened because I registered for a notification that I would send myself when the webview finished loading, but I wouldn't check who's webview it was. I have fixed that now, and a few other things, but it still has some bugs, including some crashers.
I also didn't get to implement the idea I had where the zoom/pan/fade effect would zoom into the part of the page where the link was that it would be following. During his judging, Jonathan Wight (schwatoo) suggested executing some JavaScript on the page in order to get the coordinates of the DOM element, which I have been meaning to try.
I have since added some code inspired by Ben Gottlieb's WikiPath (his winning entry to the Iron Coder contest), specifically:
- the TestHarness
- using javascript to get the list of links from the webview
My original entry is archived at the main ironcoder repository along with a dmg with all the entries.
2008-01-13 1.1 Lots of bug fixes and improvements. 2007-04-01 1.0 Original entry to the IronCoder 5 contest.
Copyright (c) 2007, Kelan Champagne (http://yeahrightkeller.com) All rights reserved.
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