“Welcome to The Interface”
“Good Evening, Curtis. Today is Saturday, September 18, 2004”
It took so many lines of code and so much time coding to get those 2 lines to show up exactly like I wanted. That was over a year ago, when GITI was still under primary development. GITI PIM – Gettting It Together Interface Personal Information Manager has been a primary project of mine since the joint completion of Address Book Database utility in Spring 2003. In my quest to learn PHP I started the project. It is now one of my most prided accomplishments, but I find that its needs are quickly outgrowing its current limitations as well as my developmental knowledge. GITI v2 was esablished a few days ago in its own little development space. So far its design is becoming more complex, but at the same time more limiting as far as GITI module inclusion. Im going with the file drawer approach with little tabs used for navigation, there is potential for more than 1 row of tabs, but moving to 3 rows would be pushing asthetic design rules I impose on myself.
For GITI v2 I invision a smooth design with all menu options availible from all pages via a hover menu. Catagories (or Classes for EDU module) should be located on the side of the page where they can be easily accessed when needed. GITI will have to become a lot more user customizable (for additional users as well as for my own convienience). Because of the reinvention of GITI I will be able to fully utilize CSS and make GITI able to have themes. This could be really cool for holidays and stuff.
In additional to the layout changes I have some proposed modules that could be added: Shipment status (via XML manifests availible from shippers), Recipe Manager (per my mother’s request), Wardrobe Inventory (this one might not make it if the usefulness isn’t there), Bookmarks, and a re-write of Journal. One of the things I have considered is having the ability to link all items between modules if needed. This would be most helpful between Schedule and Journal I believe. I theorize that based on the concept that GITI keeps a running record of your life, so why not let it also keep your narratives about it stored in relation to scheduled events in your life?
After I started working on the screen shots for my last post (which are still availible at http://curtis.kularski.net/GITI) I determined that GITI is a very good record keeping system for knowing all of my past events and other things. I didn’t think of it that way when I originally created it and as such doesn’t have nearly as many datestamps in it as it should. I think with version 2 I will have a lot more notations and transaction tracking. I am sort of inspired by IETF’s Internet Draft Status tracker for that aspect. Every major action that occurs with a document that is submitted for the RFC Editor is logged. This could be a nice system for tracking the status of different types of records in GITI. Recipes in the theoretical recipe module obviously wouldnt need it, but ToDos and schedule items could use that ability. A lot of the statuses themselves were written to be binary values, but through much experience with GITI I have determined that statuses can’t be Yes, No or On, Off. There are a lot of in-betweens. More In-Progress things would probably be helpful.
In preparing for this redesign of GITI I am learning a lot more about practical coding than I ever thought I would. I will be posting more screen shots of GITI as it nears being ready for active use in v2.
I guess I will be off to my world of writing GITI for now…