The internship wraps up today, and I decided to wrap things up by livening up the AppDB home page with a screenshot carousel.

Normally I'm not terribly interested in purely cosmetic changes; all the previous changes to the layout that I've made have been to improve usability. But the old home page was afflicted with a sad little jpeg surrounded by too much whitespace at the upper right corner. It just was crying out for something better, and the AppDB has an abundance of screenshots.

Bootstrap made setting up the carousel fairly easy, though there were some minor glitches before I got the surrounding text to behave itself. The main problem then was image sizing.

The sceenshots in the AppDB come in many different sizes and aspect ratios. The carousel would display the full width of the screenshots, but size itself up or down as needed to keep the proportions. The result was a very unpleasant jumping up and down of the text below the carousel as it resized itself.

Limiting the height of the carousel and setting overflow to hidden stopped the jumping, but it meant that taller screenshots were all arbitrarily cropped at the bottom, and the results weren't usually pleasing.

Ultimately I decided to select an assortment of screenshots from the AppDB and manually edit them to uniform proportions for the carousel. The results went live a few minutes ago, as I write this.

This will be my last blog post for awhile; there will be one more to report on WineConf2017, which I'll be attending at the end of October. This isn't, however, the end of my work on the AppDB. I have a list of things I still want to do.