Text 7233, 64 rader
Skriven 2006-11-03 17:55:28 av Ian Hoare (1:275/311)
     Kommentar till en text av Sean Dennis
Ärende: Re: Behind!
===================
Hi Sean, 

If you'll permit an oldie to give you some oldie advice.

Don't even think about starting ANY coding, till well after Christmas.

Let's spend the intervening time looking at what MM does well, less well and
not at all, Let's look hard at what the parameters are going to be (number
of records and fields, field size etc) Let's decide how you're going to set
up the defaults and what you CAN set. 

When you have a really good program design that we all can either live with
or better, THEN we can start coding the modules. For example, you say that
printer support will be minimal and usb support non existent. Why? Windows
should handle that, like it should be able to handle screen drivers. You
need to decide what flavour of windows this will work under, 3.1? 95? 98?
NT? 2000? Millenium? XP or Vista? 

Also, you'll need to see how Scott reacts, he MAY just want to clamber on
board, which - if true - would be great. 

Do you know Eudora or Agent? If not, please do go and get them, to see how
the configs work. You can set most options via menus, but they are saved in
xxx.ini files which can be edited. 

Do you see this as being a program that runs as a dos style prog in a dos
style window under windows, or a genuinely windows native program? If the
latter, then remember the windows standard commands. CTRL O to open a file
CTRL S to save one, F4 to close a window ALT-F4 to close down the program.

I have a REAL horror of using function keys to do things. OK, Windows has
some standard command, but in general I find them positively user hostile.
Make sure all the sections "look and feel" as much the same as possible, so
that the program is as intuitive as possible. 

I take the point that Dale makes about some of MM's capabilities being hard
to find and perhaps not too obvious to reach. We'd need to address that.

I'd see a menu across the top (pull down menus are so much part of windows,
that I don't think you can omit them) it/they could be context sensitive as
in NYC, or fixed. Maybe icons instead of words - again that's the "wimp"
environment. However I see no reason why there shouldn't be keyboard
shortcuts, either following MM standards, Dos standards or Windows norms.
Hovering the mouse over the icon should produce a bubble with the command or
commands. Many windows progs have a text menu line with icons beneath. It
could be useful if these were user choosable. See Agent for how that works.

So, to repeat. Start by deciding the essential. What's the basic database
structure? Once that's chosen, then decide about techy stuff like units. How
bright are the conversions going to be? Is there any reason why 1/4 c
chopped onion shouldn't convert to something really sensible like 30 gms
rather than the utterly useless 4 tbs. (metric systems of food measure use
weight for solid foods - and there's no reason why there couldn't be some
kind of look-up table for conversions). Will you cycle through conversions
as MM does or do a global one like NYC? Will you allow for both fractions
and decimals? What sort of internal conversions will you automatise? So if
you have a recipe that calls for 1 teaspoonful of flour, will multiplying it
by 3 convert to 1 tablespoon? It should. 


Bon appetit
Ian in Forges
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