The Real World comes a-calling: five weeks of coding fun!

As a techie, I have to admit that when we put our new kiosks into place on the first and second floors, they looked rather excellent.

However, as often happens to techies, it didn't take long for the real world to point out what should have been glaringly obvious to me all summer.

As soon as people started to look at these fine kiosks, staff immediately started to comment on the fact that everyone had to incline their head to one side to work out where they were.

I had even been doing the same myself, without realising it.

The explanation was simple.  The floorplan graphics had all been drawn with our main entrance at the bottom of the picture.  This meant that, when viewed at a kiosk location on an upper floor, the map was orientated at 90 degrees to the standpoint of the user.

So, a subject that was shelved straight in front of someone appeared as if it should be off to their right.

My subconscious mind had must have been suppressing this blooper for at least a year, when it had been the first thing my daughter mentioned when I showed her the floorplans (don't you wish you had an interesting Dad like me?).  This time, I couldn't take refuge behind parental knowing-it-all.

I was going to have to rotate the floorplans.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?  That is certainly what everyone thought who suggested it to me.  'What don't you just ...'

However, to pull it off, I had to go back to beginnings with the first and second floor image files, and redraw new versions of the graphics.  This was because of my earlier innocence when converting the floorplans into vector graphics: which left me with no way to rotate the floor without all the text turning onto its side.

That set me off on five weeks of recoding two floors to reflect the real world.

I finished the job on Friday afternoon (it is now Monday morning), and still can hardly believe I am free of it.  The end results are what I should have aimed for from the beginning.  Now that I have mapped all the text and building landmarks as proper mathematical co-ordinates, I have plans that I can edit quickly and easily.

The end results are worth every second I spent on them.  I just wish I had known eighteen months ago how I could have avoided myself needing to do them.