antimatter15 / Cloudsave

############# Cloud Save

It's actually really amazing how many people now use Cloud Save. In fact, when I first built this, I had no idea how anyone would possibly find this extension of any practical use whatsoever. I still only have a vague idea as to how it could be used, so this probably implies that I'm not the best maintainer of this project but at least it's popular and rather awesome. Personally, I find drag2up much more original, innovative and awesome.

Cloud Save is still pretty cool though. And it's not a terrible name, actually. Its probably the one project of mine which actually has a fairly decent name.

Right now, I'm going to try doing development of cloud save on the cloud via the cloud9 IDE on a Cr-48. It's going pretty well so far and it's really awesome.

############## Design for Cloud Save 1.2

Version 1.2 will feature tons and tons of magic. Really really magical magic.

The basis is a moving window-ish persistant stack which contains the names of hosts used. eg. dropbox, dropbox, picasa, picasa, box.net, google docs, dropbox, google docs, dropbox

Right now, I figure the ideal value is 10. Why? Because Math.sqrt(10) day is next week and also incidentally my birthday is on sqrt(10) day. It's also between five and fifteen, if my third grade arithmetic skills are still intact.

So this moving window is kept persistantly via localStorage. It gets processed and sorted into unique elements: dropbox, picasa, google docs, box.net. Then those are sorted by a magical ranking coefficient.

The general formula for this ranking index is number_of_times_used_in_past_10 + most_recent_index / index_dampening_factor

dropbox was used 4 times in that list - most recent is the last one of the list of so index 8 picasa twice - most recent index is 3 box.net once - most recent index is 4 google docs twice - most recent index is 7

the index dampening factor should be a big number. the second term in the magical equation that is used here exists for the sole purpose of breaking ties between things used an equal number of times to favor those who have been used more recently (or should it be a smaller number?). A good value is something like the total size of the moving window multiplied by 10. But to be safe, something like 1000 could be used. Though any number should theoretically work, for debugging purposes it would be nice if it was a power of ten.

The top six most recently used hosts will be shown. Or less than that if the last ten include less than six items (again, ordered by the rank thing).

Once a file is uploaded, the list must be recalculated and generated.

The first level menu will be the same:

Cloud Save >

Second level:

Save As... >

HOst1 Host2 Host3 Host5 Host6 Host4

More >

There are two tertiary menus. Save As... however looks exactly like the secondary level menu but without another save as submenu (obviously).

So the More.. menu, which is the only interesting tertiary menu will be as follows:

Add/Remove...

HostA HostB HostC HostD HostE HostF HostG HostH ...

As follows. The tertiary list will include all the other hosts in alphabetical order.

Add/Remove is sort of a misnomer as it will not actually do anything in verison 1.2 instead, it'll be a link to the settings page which will do virtually nothing except for configuring some very magical variable coefficients and stuff. probably.

These plans were written at 4:23PM Eastern Standard Time on the Eleventh of March of the year 2011.