developer.matthewthornton.info

Well, I decided on a another, more marketable path.  The market for task management software is boring as hell.  Even doing something that would be a generic approach would be boring.  I have got the start of a business venture going and I’ll update this blog with lessons learned about and the tools and languages I have come to use.

It may seemed scatterbrained but I am thinking I’m going to start with a smaller project and work my way up to the big task management project.  This first project is in honor of the great Benjamin Franklin and his 13 virtues.  I am going to create a webapp on Google App Engine that corresponds with his own personal “self-help” regimine.  Some of the requirements are as follows:

• Create a 13×7 grid of the virtues/days of the week.  Use checkboxes for whether or not a person violated said virtue.
• Be able to recall previous weeks.
• Randomize each week a virtue to focus on.
• (Optional) Make use of google’s graphing apis to maybe generate some statistics.

As you can see, it’ll be pretty simple at first but, as always, if others find it interesting, I’ll work towards maintaining it more.  This is a precursor to using google app engine as the location for my task management software.

I have slightly revised my objectives of this task management project.  At first, it was just a simple way of making applications interchange task data.  While this is an objective still ultimately, I’ve determined that a more interesting route and problem to solve is an idea of an “Ubiquitous Task Environment”, that is, a way of introducing plugins to existing applications that have task-related information (Tasks from a GANT chart, e-mail applications, mind maps, existing todo lists, etc.) as a way of consolidating information about tasks in one place.  This naturally dovetails into writing applications but I think this is an interesting idea and I’m going to run with it for a while.  I think in the next couple weeks I’m going to work on designs for a data store, and maybe a list of plugins to work on.  (This gives me the added benefit of learning some of the plugin environments out there.)

I finished the tutorial project from the Apple website.  You can download the “answer code” from the Tutorial page above.  To Apple, if you’re unhappy with me posting the code (for reasons passing understanding) let me know and I’ll take it down.

Welcome to my developer site.  This is a site for my computing projects of various types and to keep you informed of updates.  I’m in the progress of learning programming in Apple and I may be playing around with some other programming tools and techniques.  This is also a site to play around with Wordpress layouts and web design stuff.  Please understand that, as a result, you should view this site as being in “perpetual beta.”