Managing Stuff

De-obfuscating the app in my earlier post.

When I was building Orca, I had to keep track of all the various components a and blueprints and minerals. In the end I've made a spreadsheet that could automatically calculate what blueprints I had, how much minerals I needed to build stuff from those I got etc. That was a success and Baldachine proves it.

On the other hand some of the data I had to put in myself before I could actually use the sheet. It was also closely tied to Orcas and everything else would require some changes.

That's when the idea of specialized app had first emerged.

The design was simple at first: 4 lists – what you have to buy, what you are going to build, what you already got and what you what to have in the end. There are ways to transfer stuff between first 3 lists triggering various events: if you move some of your Capital Cargo Bays from "to buy" to "to build", you'll get tons of minerals and blueprints in your "to buy" list. When those are in "acquired" list, you have an option to "manufacture" those bays.

Later 5th list appeared – "Spent" – which contains whatever you have spent to get what you currently have in "Acquired".

Currently I'm working on saving and loading projects, as well as exporting them to external files. Short-term plans also include adding more options for moving records around and fixing few bugs (anyone else can't see Capital Ship Maintenance Bay Blueprint in the "To buy" list? That kind of bugs).

And, of course, making it all sexier is high-priority as well. Such as replacing the red bar with a nice-looking arrow pointing up – it's used to collapse the upper part to see more in the rest of lists. Maybe images of items in the list.

Orca's Ready

While it was quite a time to cook it in the end, I was too air-headed to think a name for it in advance. The idea was to name it after something that is slow and huge but still moves even if lubberly.

The image appearing in my mind was of something like a flying elephant. Not an agile little elephant who can flap its ears and do nifty air tricks. Something that can hardly control its movement.

The name is Baldachine. Ask me if you don't know who is that.

Waving Around

I'd say wave is really a good tool for both communication and organizing stuff. While its communication format isn't something I've never seen before, the organizing part is really good. Until now I had options of either keeping my notes and papers and docs in a single place, or putting it to online access but spread between different service providers. Now, using wave gadgets, I can keep my notes both online, in one place and nicely arranged between waves. That's good.

So what would I use waves for? That's easy – I need some feedback on my app during early design stages. It's better to have opinions gathered before I finalized everything.

Speaking of design: I've got a concept and UI design and now I got to program the transitions between states. It's going to be like 3 states and 4 possible transitions. 2 of those are done. Also crucial is save/load feature. For now I can feed the app some hard-coded test data and play around with it making nice screenshots and posting them to wave for feedback.

You say I've obfuscated the part on my app, I say – not just it.