NFG

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Developer Info

We encourage anyone who has an interest in programming, databases, interface design or even just goldfish to help develop this project. Any input is welcomed.

Goals/Aims

-XHTML Compliance
-Completely operating system and browser independent
-To kick ass.

Design Guidelines

In order to make the world a better place...

• Don't use images just to antialias text.
  It's just so pointless.
• Don't use images for every action.
  At first it seems like a good idea - why not use a small, space saving calendar icon instead of writing "Calendar" ? It would require zero translation! Yeah, it seems like a good idea, but people don't speak in icons. Especially when the icons are low res and ugly. UI designs that use images extensively lead to longer learning/loading times and confusing support (For example, when every little link is only a fancy icon, explaining things over the phone becomes a ridiculously difficult process: "Yeah, click the small do-hickey that looks like a hamster, yeah, its next to the greenish sausage shaped image". Text links are good.) The admin, not the developers, of the system should insert their own images if they want.
• Use the screen space as efficiently as possible.
  Don't make the user maximize the browser window. A website shouldn't be so arrogant to think that the user doesn't have better things to do with his/her screen space. How many times have you tried to have a window open beside your browser, only to find that the page scales so badly that the information contained then becomes complete nonsense? Modern operating systems can multitask, so its safe to assume somebody would want to multitask.
• Don't code scripts to display useless bits of info
  ("We have 4363465 Members and a billion hits! And 150 users are online!")
  It may help webdeveloper's egos to include overly technical information in a page for all to see, but in the end it doesn't have any affect on anyone's life. It's just a waste of cycles and visual pollution.

ToDo

I would like to see similar scripts to this mp3 tag reader for other file formats. There has to be some open source software that does this somewhere. I'm looking to index mp3 tags into the user's sqlite DB, but I would like to have such functionality for other file formats such as vorbis also. Maybe WMA too. It would give people greater search capability. (Notice this paragraph doesnt contain a single buzzword or mention of spotlight, metadata or longhorn. Too much BS hype.)

License

You can use NFG code however you wish. Software or scripts you can optionally use with NFG (PEAR, etc) have their own licenses that could be different. You have no warranty or guarantee that any of this software will function or not kill you.

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