My Recent Projects

Rather than blog about my recent work, I thought I'd try Google Sites. I'm not exactly sure why, but a Site does have the ability to break things down into pages, rather than creating ONE HUGE blog post, or an unconnected stream of related posts.

There's stuff about Google Apps to create web applications or improve processes, Livecode multimedia authoring and a little visualisation stuff.

Anyway, here it is:

https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/tom-smith/2014-2015-projects

Comments

Writing a Simple QR Code Stock Control Spreadsheet

At Theatre, Film & TV they have lots of equipment they loan to students, cameras, microphone, tripod etc. Keeping track of what goes out and what comes back is a difficult job. I have seen a few other departments struggling with the similar "equipment inventory" problems. A solution I have prototyped uses QR codes, a Google Spreadsheet and a small web application written in Apps Script. The idea is, that each piece of equipment ( or maybe collection of items ) has a QR code on it. Using a standard and free smartphone application to read QR codes, the technician swipes the item and is shown a screen that lets them either check the item out or return it. The QR app looks like this. The spreadsheet contains a list of cameras. It has links to images and uses Google Visualisation tools to generate its QR codes. The spreadsheet looks like this. The Web Application The web application, which only checks items in or out and should be used on a phone in conjunctio

Inserting A Google Doc link into a Google Spreadsheet (UPDATED 6/12/2017)

This article looks at using Apps Script to add new features to a Google Spreadsheet. At the University of York, various people have been using Google spreadsheets to collect together various project related information. We've found that when collecting lots of different collaborative information from lots of different people that a spreadsheet can work much better than a regular Google Form. Spreadsheets can be better than Forms for data collection because: The spreadsheet data saves as you are editing. If you want to fill in half the data and come back later, your data will still be there. The data in a spreadsheet is versioned, so you can see who added what and when and undo it if necessary The commenting features are brilliant - especially the "Resolve" button in comments. One feature we needed was to be able to "attach" Google Docs to certain cells in a spreadsheet. It's easy to just paste in a URL into a spreadsheet cell, but they can often

Using Google Spreadsheets To Improve Student Accommodation

The Problem Tim Saunders, is fast becoming the poster boy for my belief that getting non-technical people coding is good idea. Tim started in the University of York accommodation office and inherited a task of managing students' requests to change their room. This room changing process was paper-based and requires various peoples' agreement and signatures. It resulted in a student having to carry an increasingly dog-eared form to college administrators and back to Tim and then to the old college administrators. It was slow, actively encouraged signature forging and reliably error prone. All the data collected then needed to be entered into SITS, our student database, which involves various charging and set up costs, so it really helps if this data is correct, having being verified by everyone in the chain. The Solution Armed with a some self-taught Javascript using the online learning platform CodeAcademy , Tim thought that the pile of paper forms in his offic

Collaborative Tools Project

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