The first collaboration

I must confess, this has been in the works for quite some time, but I'm excited to finally be able to say it! Apart from that, I'm of course getting along with the web-app, unfortunately not as quickly as I would've liked. I of course also have an update, on how the Facebook advertising went (spoiler alert: not too well). Why don't we dive a little deeper?

These last weeks' progress

I'm not as quick when developing in Angular as in Flutter, hence me skipping last week's blog post. I think I will continue like this, to give myself an extra half day every second week. But who knows, maybe I will go back again?

Facebook advertising (again)

You could probably call me impatient, but I did two weeks of advertising without any clicks. What did I do? I stopped advertising, and went back to the drawing board. I'm still trying to figure out, what I didn't do right, my current thought has to do with the images I used. But I'll have to dive a little deeper on this one, and brainstorm some more.

In some other news, two days after stopping advertising, my Facebook account was "deactivated" on the Meta platform. The reasoning for this was that "I haven't been following the advertisement guidelines", which didn't really make any sense for me. I of course requested that my account would be reactivated. Just as of writing this, I could see that it has been reactivated, so all's good here. What made me laugh a bit though, was the fact that I still received multiple mails, encouraging me to begin advertising on their platform (thank you Meta). Oh yea... I also received those mails, while I was advertising on their platform.

Progress on the website

Not too much have happened visually on the website, since the last blog post, but some stuff have been happening under the hood (fortunately).

One of those things, is that the user now have the ability to edit directly in the text boxes. When you click into a box, you can just begin to write/edit the text inside the box, and when you're done you either press enter or the save button, and it will be saved and synced to the backend. When editing a text bubble it will be doing the exact same thing as the app does. Comparing the text from before, to the new text, and then assigning timeframes cleverly (an average) to the newly written text. To get this working, took me almost the whole of last week. The reason that this took so long, was that I wanted the transcription to update visually in real time, so there wouldn't be any interruptions for the user editing it. When beginning to do the speaker editing soon, I foresee this as being a big challenge to achieve, but I will be looking forward to doing it!

What I've focused on doing this week, is making it ready for the speaker editing. This has required a media player, that can stream the recording, so the user can listen to it. Getting to stream it, was quite easily done. Amplify made this very easy, with creating a link that you can stream the recording from, nice. The hard part here, was visualising this, with a custom progress bar. And yes, of course I could copy paste someone else's progress bar, but it just wouldn't achieve what I want from it. What is it I wan't from it then? Well it shouldn't just be a progress bar, that can show how long the recording is, and how long you have listened. When clicking on a chat bubble, it should also choose the timeframe of the audio, the bubble content is said within. And it shouldn't just jump to the place in the audio, no, it should actually visualise it on the progress bar... Let me just show it.

As you can see, when I'm clicking on different chat bubble (that part you can't see), it will then choose the timeframe of the recording for that specific chat bubble. I'm quite proud of this thing, it is nearly fully functional. Nearly... There's one thing I can't for the life of me get to work. That thing is for the user to take the orange knob and drag it. To do this, I have to make an eventlistener, when the user presses the mouse down on the timeline, this part works fine. What doesn't work, is removing the listener when the user releases the mouse, you don't have to be an expert to tell that it's a problem... I have taken it to Stack Overflow, to try and get help on the problem, but not too much luck there either. If you would like to take a look at it, and maybe you have a fix for it? Here's the link to the question:

typescript - window.removeEventListener not working in Angular - Stack Overflow

A small change I've also made, was making the side column on both the transcription page and recordings page, sticky. This means that they will stick to the same place on the screen when scrolling. That took a surprising amount of time... I'm still not totally familiar with CSS and HTML, and I don't quite feel like I ever will. In my opinion, Flutter is much better and user friendly, but that's just my opinion.

The collaboration

Finally, as I said in the start, this has been in the works for a long time, since march 9. to be exact. One and a half month, damn. But it's done now, and collaboration is with Studenterlauget, the student association on Aarhus BSS, a part of Aarhus University. For me this is an exciting step, because I really do think they are one of the best partners I could have. Their members fit perfectly in my target group, and I think this collaboration we will supplement each other very well. I'm definitely looking forward, to where this will take Mellonn. Of course I hope this will only be the first collaboration, Mellonn will be making!

What's next?

Right now, this is much of doing "what i didn't get done yesterday". I have a long list of stuff I need to implement on the website, and it will most definitely keep me going for quite some time. But in the next couple of weeks, I'm aiming to get the basic editing features done. Mostly the speaker editing, will be the focus of next week, and after that I will see how much I can get done. I will also continue reaching out to potential partners, for new collaborations.

See you again in two weeks!

I will go back to work, and do my thing while I let you do your thing. Thank you again for reading this, and I will hopefully see you again in a couple of weeks! Have a good weekend 😊