Good tools

I decide to take the challenge, 通訳案內士試験, which the first exam will take place in the end of August.

There’s many thing need to study and the time left little to me. But I still want to enjoy the study and want to use some tool I know to help me.

The first tool is Timeline.js.

This tool is to give the designer to create good timeline using jQuery. I give it a try, it works fine. To create the timeline of Japan History, I scan the wikipedia and fill-in the Google Spreadsheet. It takes three days for me to finish it, and I think I had done it very quick.

Here’s the result.
日本の歴史: 上古-江戶 明治-現代

I think it’s good, but sometimes I just want to collect the location of some historical locations. After some finding, I got one - Maplace.js

I was attracted by the demo page. There exist some other plugins which looks powerful, but the one I want is simple and I need to know what can it gives me. The demo page gives good example, I turn out just want to have a single collection for the location of Japanese Temple.

Here’s the result. 日本の寺

I think it’s really exciting to find a good tool for lazy people like me to quickly use it. There exist two points which are important to me. The first one is Demo Page. It don’t have to be fantastic, but it need to be useful and directly tell user what it can provide.

The second one is good Q&A. I think Maplace.js is good tool which drives many user to use it. But the guide is not helpful. I happened to get empty page at the first try. And then I find that the problem is that I should provide the exact size to the div container. And I got this answer from StackOverflow other than the Github page. Anyway, it’s a good tool. But any more information in homepage will be more friendly to users.

• Kala Kuo