Wednesday, April 27, 2016

The JumpGo Project: Part 1

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In The Beginning...
I started the JumpGo project in 2011 when I set out to create my own web browser for Windows. At this time the browser was not called "JumpGo Browser", but in fact was titled "Web Match" which was a typo as it was supposed to spell "Web Mach". This typo was not corrected for a long time, and by the time it was it had already made its way through my family as being the name of my browser. So i decided to come up with an entirely new name that wouldn't be confused with the misprint of the old name.
In 2012 however, the development of the actual browser hadn't even started as I was still trying to grasp the concepts of various computer languages such as C++, Python and BASIC. Because of this, the browser was still a concept with a graphical interface, nothing more. Clearly the browser was going nowhere fast. Soon I began to forget about the browser completely as I was preparing for the daunting task of starting high school. I began rushing to learn all I could from my C++ and Python books before I started high school and had no time for programming lessons.
When time came for me to choose my electives for 2013 I found a computer programming choose in the choices. Of course I signed up for it immediately. The course started out with an introduction to computing and a history of the computer. Later we started learning how to use the Visual Basic 2008 Express version of Visual Studio. Our instructor informed us that we would soon have an upgrade to Visual Studio 2012 and we would be able to make use of other new features not available in the 2008 edition of Visual Basic.
I spent a great deal of time learning the Visual Basic.NET language. It was a very simple and easy to use language and very extendable. I then started taking a look at some of my old abandoned projects and began rewriting them in VB.NET because I rather like it as a language. I found my old web browser and started to write up the code for it and made a very simple, one-page browser with limited functionality.


This was, in my opinion, when JumpGo really began to take form. Even though it was as simple as a single page with a navigation bar that beeps every time you hit the enter key, it was building more character with every line of code. That's what it felt like to me.