I don't know if this can be coded quickly or not, although the basic idea seems simple. I'm looking for something simple that can display a meter on my desktop. Specifically, it must allow for multiple instances / meters. This meter would have a text title, then a progress bar that would indicate a target and the amount completed. Ideally, there'd be a text line underneath with the completed / target amounts. Although I suspect others could use this for other types of projects, I'd use it as a word count meter.
I'd put up meters for every book, article, or story I'm actively working on, listing the title. The meter itself would show targets of, say, 12,000 words, or 90,000, or whatever my target for that work was. Then I'd enter a word count (total if needed, daily if it is easy enough to add this to the previous total) and the meter would display the result. Say, 3,000 words of 12,000, and the bar would be 25% filled. Below, it would read "3,000 / 12,000". Of course, most actual percentages would not be so easily calculated, but that's what a computer is for, isn't it?
Ideally, if this isn't too hard to code (I shouldn't think it would be), I'd like to be able to specify the colour of the meter. If it isn't that hard, different colours for text, progress bar, and filled in portion of bar would be even nicer. In either case, the ideal would be settings for each
meter, not just overall settings. (So I could make certain projects stand out, if I needed to.) Oh, and choice of fonts would be nice, rather than putting up with whatever MS decides is the default. But I have no idea how hard this stuff is: I know in HTML it is easy enough to specify fonts and colours, but selecting them from an app isn't anything I've tried playing with yet.
I have a feeling this might make it too complicated, but if not, the ability - just for the filled in progress portion - of being able to set different colours at different "levels" would be a real plus: say, for a particular work, any count under 20,000 would show up as red, any count under 45,000 would show up as yellow, and anything over that would be green. But with custom colour choices.
The idea is to have an
easy way (yes, I know, if I go into Samurize and go through enough work - including editing every day when I need to update - I could probably get this) to list all my active projects, with a visual, easily updateable meter and stats on my progress on each. If there's no way around it, a simple pop up window with the information would be better than nothing, but I've found the ability to show something right on the desktop where I can't avoid seeing it at least sometimes to be very helpful. In fact, if it can't be on the desktop (I don't know how hard that aspect would be) the next best option would be to combine this with a routine to pop up the window at set intervals (user choice) headed by a customisable reminder / prompt.
One caveat: I don't want to mislead anyone. Right now, I don't have any spare cash to donate. I'd gladly hand some out to anyone who could do this - but I can't say how long it might take before I have the ability. I do know a lot of other people who could use this, and I'd happily point them to it, along with a plug for a donation - but writers tend to be broke, so I don't know how much result you'd see. Although we are good at understanding the position of others who are struggling to see some reward for their efforts.
That may be why I think the idea behind DC is so cool.
