December development plans

During this month, I'm going to try to complete the Weekly Activity application: one of the comic book collecting applications that is part of Longbox. Over the last few months, I've been slowly poking at this application is the desperate hope that something useful might emerge from the morass. This has been partially effective, but often leaves me searching for the next piece of functionality that needs implementing. Furthermore, having never written down how these parts were supposed to work, I'm not really certain which parts actually do work the way that I would like.

With this in mind, I've decided to add a touch of *shudder* process to my hacking. Typically, I do this by describing stories: islands of functionality described from the user's perspective. If I sort these into priority order, every time I sit down to do some coding, I should be able to find something small to accomplish.

So... What's the story behind the Weekly Activity application that I'm working on for Longbox? This application should help automate the processes associated with buying new comic releases at my local comic book store.

Every week, I download new release lists from Diamond Comics and pick out the books that I have on my pull list at the local shop. This process involves two lists: this week's releases and next week's releases. When I have time, I update both sets of releases. I would like to be able to view these release lists in the application and be able to add them to my pull list. Further functionality would be to use the same interface to add or remove these titles to my record of my pull list at the shop.

When I go to the shop, I usually like to have a list of the items that I plan to purchase. Sometimes the store puts variant covers, second printings into the items they reserved for me; having a list of notes helps me sort through these. Therefore, the application should produce this print-out.

When I return from the shop, I usually record my purchases. Translating this into the application: I should be able to mark which items from my pull list that I actually bought. In addition to items from my pull list, I would also like to be able to record any impulse item that I bought.

If I can find the time, I hope to finish this portion of Longbox before returning from holidays. Next step? Recording my list of stories...

Shipping list display

The current functionality that I'm trying to complete is the Weekly Releases GUI. A work-in-progress description of this appears on the project page.

Diamond Comics, the distributor of comic books to specialty stores, makes a list of releases due to ship for a given week available on their website. This file is reasonable regular and easy to parse. I decided that, when planning weekly releases, a user might want to use the files available from Diamond to populate to select new items.

The end result of this week-end's efforts is a dialog which allows you to select (by date) from recently downloaded shipping lists. A filter can be applied so that the list only shows items that the user is currently collecting. Also, the list can be organized by section (one of several headings that appear in the shipping list - typically the name of a publisher).



Next steps

The collecting filter functionality requires a specific database schema. I'm still working out how to set up the underlying database that Longbox relies on.

The shipping files must be manually downloaded into a predefined directory structure. Currently, this must be done manually. Eventually, the button on the top right of the dialog will trigger additional UI which will allow the user to select which files they would like to download.