elliot winard

Late night addendum: I just put up the first build and now I’m off to sleep. Only the first 3 items have images.

Last night I went down to Secret Studios to help my buddy Brad out and compose cello & trumpet parts for parts of a song. I remembered just how much I enjoy playing music with other folks — how different it is from my usual playing music at home to myself and my cat. Now I’m looking forward to hear how the song ends up when Freia (a *real* cello player) plays the cello part & Brad finds a skilled horn player to play the trumpet part.

Earlier in the day I started a little programming project in LZX to display details about a list of things that I need to sell before I leave San Francisco — furniture, home appliances, books, clothes — a lot of stuff. It’s been a few months since I had a fairly clear idea about a software tool that I wanted to build outside of my day-job at Laszlo Systems.

It was cool how smoothly the first round of design & development of the app went. Using pen & paper, (yeah, I know. so old-fashioned.) I wrote out a high-level description of the goals of the project - to create an explorer of pictures & textual information about things that I wanted to sell. On the same piece of paper I sketched out a little design for the UI of the app - it’ll take design elements from the file-system explorers to expose master-detail relationships between item names & item details. My mind started racing with all sorts of cool features to add - allowing users to stake claims on various items & reserve the item for a period of time, creating a database back-end and an admin app to maintain the item information, multiple sales, multiple users, clickable images.

I immediately dove into schematizing the sale and the things that the application will display. Then, in about an hour, I whipped together the first partially-functional but programmer-arty item browser — complete with display of detail data including pictures for selected items.

Not wanting to lose my precious work, I quickly installed subversion on my workstation and checked in my newly created project. Now, on day two of the project, I’m looking into adding more images & potentially posting my progress to my server soon.

ADDITIONAL NOTE - Yeah, my indie-fix of the Treo600 didn’t work out so well. The device worked like a charm for the rest of the day & then stopped working the following morning.