After a couple days working on it, Orbited Live Help, which I mentioned last month, now seems to mostly work. There are still a few features I want to add to it, and a couple bugs to work out, but you should be able to click that link, and use Live Help to join us in the #orbited IRC channel, where the Orbited developers can answer your questions. Or if you like, just stop by to say hello.

The server-side code was left nearly untouched, from Mario’s WebIRC. But I rewrote all of the browser-side HTML, JavaScript (using jQuery), and CSS. The result is something that I think better serves its purpose as both a demonstration Orbited application (though it’s perhaps less impressive, it’s simpler to use), and as a live support chat (where extra features just get in the way). Also, it no longer has a garish color scheme: Sorry Mario, but CSS “red” should almost never be used in a design.

The JavaScript code is much cleaner, even if some functionality was removed. As one example, the code to handle the orbited event where someone leaves the chat room went from this:

function userLeft(data) {
    chat_box = document.getElementById(data[1]+'text');
    div = document.createElement('div');
    div.className = "left";
    sender = document.createElement('span');
    sender.className = "sender";
    sender.innerHTML = data[0];
    message = document.createElement('span');
    message.className = "message";
    message.innerHTML = data[1];
    linker = document.createElement('span');
    linker.innerHTML = data[2];
    div.appendChild(sender);
    div.appendChild(linker);
    div.appendChild(message);
    chat_box.appendChild(div);
    if (currentChan == data[1]) {
        box = document.getElementById('box');
        box.scrollTop = box.scrollHeight;
    };
};

To this:

function userLeft(leaver, channel, message) {
  $("<div class='informative part'></div>")
    .html("<span class='user>" + leaver + "</span> " + message + CHANNEL)
    .appendTo("#chathistory");

  removeName(leaver);
};

Needless to say, I vastly prefer the latter for clarity.

The new chat now highlights lines where someone mentions you by name, and the next version will handle tab completion of nicknames. I’d like to prettily style the user list, and maybe add some icons to it, but there’s plenty of other things to do around here in the mean time.

[Update, 2007-08-29: Add image that actually shows some people in the channel]

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.