Chris's Life

I got the opportunity to show off some of my stuff at work today. Byron (my Boss) said that it was probably time to start showing people where we're going with the interface, since it's such a departure from the current interface. I got the impression that the idea is both to get lots of feedback and viewpoints early on in the process (which is a very good idea) and also to make sure that everyone knows where we're going.

We got a lot of good feedback and the new interface (which is still very incomplete) was generally well recieved, I thought. The consensus seemed to be that it will be much easier to use than the current generation. On the downside I'm still not good at explaining some of the additional power because I could tell that I was scaring a few people that it would be so complex that no one could use it. It's one of my major design goals that no complexity will be required for a task past what's inherently required for the task (for example, I can't design a user interface so easy to use that you can enter text without typing it in).

I think, though, that explaining the power will be much easier when I have working code that demonstrates it — I'm not very good at describing simple things simply. When there's something fairly simple and intuitive to look at, it will go a long way to making it clear that it really won't be overly complex or difficult to use. :-)

I'm also making decent progress, though I do think that I should be further along. It's a bit frustrating because there are a lot of interlocking bits and pieces that I have to keep bouncing around, filling out, so no particular piece of progress looks like much. That's OK, of course — it will look impressive enough when it's done — but it would be more fun if progress looked faster. :-)

My software is coming along at work. Unfortunately, for everything visible I do there's a lot of back-end work that goes into it which no one but me sees, but even so, I'm making some visible progress.

I refined the interface for dealing with the sign a bit (though some of it will need to be re-written once I actually write the scheduler, but for the time being I'm ignoring that portion of things). I finally came up with a decent interface to manage the libraries, and have a skeleton for that done. I hope to flesh that out tomorrow so that it's usable.

Once that's done, I'll probably begin on the scheduler. The scheduler is going to be a fair amount of work, though most of it will be detail work which isn't too hard; the real bear is going to be efficiently figuring out when schedules collide. I do think that I've mostly figured out how to do that, though.

Things are starting to come together. Once a few more pieces are in place, all of the work designing the system will really start to show its worth. I'm really getting excited. I think that this software system will really be some good work. The future, as always, remains to be seen, of course, but I think that I have legitimate reason to be optimistic.