NANY 2013 Withdrawn: Track My Stuff!

[wraith808]

NANY 2013 Entry Information

Application Name	Track My Stuff!
Short Description	Track your items and who you lent them to.
Supported OSes	Windows XP/Vista/7
Setup File	TBA
Description	I have a lot of xbox games because I don't trade them in because I play sporadically.  So when my son's friends come over, they want to borrow games.  I don't mind- but I also don't play enough to notice when they haven't returned them.  This was my solution.
Features	Tracks your items, and who currently has them.  Customizable description fields, and image of item.
Screenshots	Coming Soon
Installation	With .NET 4.0 installed, unzip application to location and run.
Uninstalling	Delete application install location.
Notes	Requires .NET 4.0.

I had to cancel this last year... but I will make it this year!

[worstje]

Suuuuuuure. That's what I tell myself, too.

(Good luck. You'll need it! )

[TaoPhoenix]

I sometimes find a useful metric is "what is this app doing that a spreadsheet won't?"

A. List of Games.
B. Status1 = Who has them
C. Status2 = Who to yell at to get the game you care about back
D. Notes1
E. Notes2

[wraith808]

^ That sounds rather... premature.  And a bit negative.  But, we'll see.

[TaoPhoenix]

^ That sounds rather... premature.  And a bit negative.  But, we'll see.

Hmm, chalk another one up to the difficulties of tone on the net. But at a broader level, it slides toward the discussion of Apps vs Docs, not counting programming time. So for example if I ever got enough focus to do it, I'd have my list of books in my collection on a spreadsheet, because that is a base line of data to begin solving problems with. Then if it comes to "borrowed items", I'd just add a column "Borrowed".

So turning back towards a positive suggestion, I'd suggest you build in some features that spreadsheets would have trouble handling.

Another situation I've wondered about also from looking over previous NANY's from prior years is the whole "App-ification of data" theme, made worse from the iOS influence on the phone side. There are some cute little programs out there that do stuff, but then suddenly you realize there's no export feature and then your data gets stuck there in a  "Sunk Cost" situation where the more you use it (unhappily) the more you feel you need to keep at it, to justify the prior time you spent.

[worstje]

I personally think TaoPhoenix has a pretty useful insight, and it is one I've subnconsciously followed for all of my apps as well. Many apps that are created are something that is easily done in Excel or Access, and as a consequence, they also tend to be apps that have been created a hundred times before in slightly different formats. In only a minority of the cases, these apps actually do something different enough to warrant existing; in the rest of the cases, the Coding Snack guideline of looking for something existing rather than making something new would seem to be a useful one to follow.

But hey, let people contribute what they want! If they have fun with it, and someone else has a use for it.. then that's all that's needed, right?

[TaoPhoenix]

I personally think TaoPhoenix has a pretty useful insight, and it is one I've subconsciously followed for all of my apps as well. Many apps that are created are something that is easily done in Excel or Access, and as a consequence, they also tend to be apps that have been created a hundred times before in slightly different formats. In only a minority of the cases, these apps actually do something different enough to warrant existing; in the rest of the cases, the Coding Snack guideline of looking for something existing rather than making something new would seem to be a useful one to follow.

But hey, let people contribute what they want! If they have fun with it, and someone else has a use for it.. then that's all that's needed, right?

I'm all for apps by small devs like here, because then sometimes we can ask and get a nice little feature that MS wouldn't bother listening to. So just to be facetious, make a feature that automatically emails the borrower to bug them to return the game!  

[wraith808]

I personally think TaoPhoenix has a pretty useful insight, and it is one I've subnconsciously followed for all of my apps as well.

It's not that... it just seems a bit premature.  After all, I've only posted an initial precis, and it wasn't really a suggestion like hey maybe you could put this in there to make it more useful or anything like that.  Don't know... just struck me in the wrong way at the time.  Not a big deal, and like I said, most of my apps are created at that intersection of useful for me and useful for learning something/honing skills, and this falls at that intersection.

[f0dder]

I personally think TaoPhoenix has a pretty useful insight, and it is one I've subnconsciously followed for all of my apps as well. Many apps that are created are something that is easily done in Excel or Access, and as a consequence, they also tend to be apps that have been created a hundred times before in slightly different formats.

...but then you're limiting yourself to the UX of Excel (or OOo calc or whatever), and you need a 200meg-or-more install.

I'm personally considering doing a couple of dedicated webapps to replace some OOo spreadsheets. One for my weekly power consumption measurements, another for keeping track of purchases (I enter receipts from everything, from groceries to large hardware purchases, to a spreadsheet). Both work kinda fine in spreadsheets, but I'm often in situations where it'd be nice to use a webapp from my smartphone rather than remembering to do it later on my desktop... also, before anybody says GoogleDocs or whatever, no. I can do a better UX with a dedicated app.

Also, it would be a chance to do something simple in Play2 and Scala to get familiar with the stuff

[wraith808]

Also, it would be a chance to do something simple in Play2 and Scala to get familiar with the stuff

Ooh... thanks for that!  I'm going to have to figure out something *else* to build to try those out!

[f0dder]

Also, it would be a chance to do something simple in Play2 and Scala to get familiar with the stuff

Ooh... thanks for that!  I'm going to have to figure out something *else* to build to try those out!

Scala looks very promising so far, even though it definitely isn't perfect. But it has a lot of the stuff I like from C#, and on a JVM... alternatives are good (though currently it's MS and whOracle, where are the alternatives to *those* abominations? ). Without doing measurements, I do think Scala will be performing worse than C#, but for a lot of applications the difference won't matter - but the mindset from it, both (pragmatic!) functional programming and immutable data matter so much more.

I'm currently doing this course, and it's pretty good - both content and the whole course platform

[wraith808]

i know we're off topic (in my own topic to boot!), but have you played with Clojure at all?  That's what I'd planned to learn functional programming in, but knowing a bit of Java already was what made me sit up and take notice of your link, and I wondered if you had any opinions on the merits of the two.

[f0dder]

i know we're off topic (in my own topic to boot!), but have you played with Clojure at all?  That's what I'd planned to learn functional programming in, but knowing a bit of Java already was what made me sit up and take notice of your link, and I wondered if you had any opinions on the merits of the two.

Nope, and I'm not going to touch it. Using a language that's not statically typed? Plain and simple: no.

If I were to pick up a language that's "noticeably" different from the ones I already know (Scala is still "within the comfort zone", and can be viewed as a Super-Java with some of the nice parts from C#), it would probably be F#.

[kilele]

Scala looks very promising so far, even though it definitely isn't perfect. But it has a lot of the stuff I like from C#, and on a JVM...

Any thoughts on Luajit ?