Sidetracked: formToArray.js

I was going to work on greeble.rb today, but I got sidetracked - sidetracked in a good way, though.

The options for a decent greeble plugin could be quite long. I started thinking about how to get all the options from a WebDialog to the plugin. I ended up coding up a way to pass an entire HTML form to a script, and create an options hash from the string.

There's 2 parts; the javascript method, and the ruby method. The javascript loops through the html form, building an array of strings in the form "key=value". The array is joined, and passed to SU-Ruby using the window.location= method. The ruby part parses the string and builds a hash from it. It sounds simple in retrospect, but it was a learning experience for me.

I'll post it when I have time to test it in use.

New 3D Warehouse Sort Options

Google has added 3 new ways to view search results on the 3D Warehouse; you can now sort your search results by date, rating, or popularity. I've commented on each of the options below.

Date - Sorts models by posted date, most recent uploads first. Works as expected.

Rating - This is a little confusing. One would think sorting by rating would produce a list with the highest-rated models first. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Sorting by rating appears to sort models into 2 categories: models that have been rated, and models that have not been rated. I'm not sure I see the value.

Popularity - I'm not sure what order the models appear when sorting by popularity. It is somehow related to a models ratings, plus some other unknown factors; possibly number of downloads and/or number of stars. I also suspect it is tied to Google Earth, since many of the most popular models were designed for downloading into Google Earth (basic shapes with texture images.) Since no one knows what it really means (outside of Google,) it is also of limited value for users.

Much more useful are some advanced search options, which will be the subject of a future post.