Tuesday, September 30, 2003

so bear with us, about the delays, we will try to blog more about the project and to move faster to make sure there is stuff that you guys can get to use and play with.

State of the Project :
We have the standard toolbars done and wired into a test form. We have New Note, Open Note , Save Note, Find ,Undo and Redo, that with the Pen toolbar is the R1 Write Free Journal. There is a bug in Open Note so we haven't released it since i haven't had time to fix that.
I will briefly talk about the design of the toolbar, maybe someone can comment or volunteer to fix it.
The Standard toolbar is a Toolbar. with buttons for each of those functions, The toolbar also has a InKPicture property. a CommandHandler object is created with an InkPicture when the ButtonClick event is fired and for each of the buttons the appropriate CommandHandler method is called e.g NewDocument(), OpenDocument() etc
CommandHandler has a constructor that takes an InkPicture and sets a private InKPicture. Thats how we get the Form's InkPicture reference.
I haven't done menu synch, i seriously considered saying shucks nobody likes menus , but after some thought i realized that there is no way to have a Windows app without menus, too many issues are addressed by menus, so we will have menu synch in some form. I think i might go with synching the menuitems directly with the toolbar buttons with like a separate object that maintains the state of the selection thats it. If anyone has done something similar and thinks that design is dumb, please comment.

and of course with the last iteration we are sure that we need to address the issue of what a document is, we have left that out there for too long, we simply got an extension and simply saved isf into that that extension, but we really need to decide what a document is at least as concerns the templates.
ok, it seems like i should be able to get at least 10 hours a day after the trip, so thats a good thing, thats pretty exciting since i met a guy at Starbucks who had considered buying a tablet sometime but went with some Mac laptop, He use it for graphics, I also met a guy at Barnes and Noble that had a TC1000 , Same evening i met the TC1000er i met a lady who said she had thought about it quite a bit. The words of the Mac defector echo in my mind "those things have to come down in price!!!!", i have for some time refused to admit that Tablets are too expensive, insisiting that the problem is lack of software. Maybe its true, but maybe its also true with the right application people will spend the money to get the functionality, I don't know, but the situation remains that there isn't enough , actuallly there isn't any software for the tablet apart from the fairly skewed offerings from vendors trying to expand their existing products and MS stuff. So though the things are too expensive , fact remains that there is STILL no software for this device. The good news is that after my trip (a day) i get my 10 hours a day to work on Write Free whcih as we said earlier is a framework, an enabler, a way for us to be able to make lots of applications for the tablet .....
yes the project is running late, but i have a trip to make and need more compute cycles for the automated building and stuff like that. On the technical capability front, I think we are in very good shape , all we need is some time and am working on getting that fixed so that at least someone can code for at least 10 hours every day. That would make it possible for us to achieve my dream of a release a day,
the approach we are taking with WriteFree Journal is a a document centric application approach. Control is expected to be provided at the document level. A document currently is a series of ink strokes probably with a background image -the all important template