This repository is home to the Smouldering Beach Ball (S.B.B) project. At a basic level, it is a Visual Studio solution. Within it, there are three smaller projects. They are a .Net Standard 2.0 library, a console program and a testing library. All three are written in F#.
The purpose of this repository is to provide a way for people to create placeholder images. It does this by making the .Net Standard library available as a NuGet package and providing a console program. If you are looking to add S.B.B's features to your project, use the NuGet package. If you just want the features of the library without writing code, use the console program.
As an aside, the console program is a traditional .Net console program and does not come with an installer.
I set the solution up with the console program and TestCentre referencing the (NuGet) library. To help you get a sense of what I mean, here is a diagram showing the relationship between the projects.
Why this Repository Exists
I made this repository to solve a personal problem. Whilst prototyping websites, I would often use web based image generators. For the most part, they worked fine but they were inconsistent enough for me to want to change how I was working. It, also, made the development experience feel slow. This is because I would need to wait for the image to download the image which was not on my personal machine. This would sometimes fail because the hosts server would reach their bandwidth limit, or something like that. It was, also, just a waste of bandwidth. With that said, the alternative options at the time were tedious. This is because I would need to use graphics programs which came with more features than I needed. This meant longer start-up times, unnecessary graphical user interfaces (G.U.I.) and loads of random-access memory (R.A.M.). So, having weighed-up both sides, I decided I wanted something in-between. The result of that decision is this repository.
Types of Placeholder Images Smouldering Beach Ball Creates
There are three types of images you can produce with S.B.B. and this applies to the NuGet package and the console program. Within the three types, you have a plethora of colour combinations to choose from. So, this should help you distinguish any images types/purposes within your proof-of-concept. The three type are:
- Single colour block
- Single colour block with a border
- Single colour block with a placeholder frame
It is important to note you can change the colour of the "border" and "placeholder frame" as a well as the main colour.
Table of Contents
As Source Code
SmoulderingBeachBall
SmoulderingBeachBallCLI
- SmoulderingBeachBallCLI Home
- C.L.I. Project Breakdown
- The C.L.I's Flow
- Creating the Input-loop
- Command-Methods Overview
- C.L.I. Validation Overview
- Changing the C.L.I. Icon
TestCentre
- TestCentre Home
- TestCentre Breakdown
- Unit and Property Tests Overview
- Console and Library Tests Overview
As a Command-Line Interface (C.L.I)
- C.L.I. Home
- Add SmoulderingBeachBallCLI to Your Machine
- Using the Console Program
- Console A.P.I.
- C.L.I. Aliases