We Like to Keep You Guessing

Good things have happened recently.  First, we managed to suck Chris into the mix for the Snake Tracker project.  Chris has extensive experience creating enterprise applications in .NET and is bringing a lot of great ideas to the table.  He also has a fantastic home theater setup in his basement.

Next, and even more confusing for anyone trying to follow us, we've settled on a name for the application.  Our goal is to eventually provide a suite of tracking software that can handle all of your animal tracking needs.  We also want to keep the application simple to use.  Using our combined creative powers, we came up with the name Simple Animal Tracker for the suite.  Now that we're 100% finalized on the name (we hope) we are going to consolidate our resources, including this blog, under that name.  The www.drunkendevelopment.com URL already points to the new blog, but for anyone accessing this site through drunkdev.blogspot.com you can find our new blog here.  Enjoy!

Coding In the Name Of...

I've started converting our user interface from WinForms to WPF.  If you're reading this, you should probably just pretend you care, just to humor me.  Thanks.  :)  Since I'm actually new to WPF (and enjoying it immensely) I've spent a lot of time staring at documentation for the past week or so.  Around Monday I invented the word "brainfucked" to describe how I was feeling.  It's a term to convey that a large amount of information has entered your brain and is now having its way with your cranium while you helplessly stare at a monitor trying to get the letters in MVVM to settle down in the right order.  Luckily, I got a bottle of Crown Royal for Christmas and it was able to tame the glyphs into submission.

Soon I hope to have the UI back to where it was before the rewrite, but now with a more robust implementation.  After that it's just a matter of slamming in some new functionality, polishing up the styles a bit, and probably more Crown Royal.  *COUGH*grossly oversimplified*COUGH*  Wish me luck; I want to have the rewrite part done by the end of this weekend.

Alpha Demo - 1/8/10, Havre de Grace, MD

Hey all,

Just wanted to post an update with some new info. First off, Blogger is having some issues so my apologies if formatting is out of whack. The new Post Editor isn't working, so I have to use an old one. Ah well.

More importantly, we have a (very) rough cut of some of the desktop app's functionality. We're going to show it around and get some feedback at the Havre de Grace show this Saturday, January 8th. Details for the show can be found here:

http://www.mdreptilefarm.com/shows/md/allmd.asp

We should be there around lunchtime. Shoot us a message if you're interested and we can figure out a place to meet up for a demo; unfortunately we don't have a table this time around, but in the future we will as the product matures.

On an unrelated note, my deepest gratitude goes out to the three people who voted that we name the application Carl. I was pushing for it, but I guess maybe it's true that the name doesn't really give a hint about what the app does. We'll most likely go with Snake Tracker. STAMP had two more votes, but it's a bit unweildy and doesn't translate well to any other form of the application we might make in the future (Rodent Tracker, anyone?). We've closed submissions for the survey. Thanks to everyone who answered; the results will be a huge help as we decide how and what to implement. I'm happy to say it looks like we're heading in the right direction so far.

Now, if y'all don't mind, I'm going to go mix a rum and coke for myself and get this thing ready for the show on the 8th. Hope to see you there!

Progress. We Has It.

It was a somewhat productive pre-Christmas weekend.  I was able to do some work on the way to and from my in-laws.  Development has shifted totally to the main Windows application in the hopes that we'll have a stable Alpha in some kind of testable state.  We'd like to be able to present something for comments in early January, when Jarrad has hopefully been able to secure a bit of exposure for us at a show in New York.  Shamefully, the December goal fell through due to those damn "Unforeseen Circumstances" people are always talking about.  Who'd have thought?  :)  We spent some time away from the code to do some market research to try and find anything worth considering as competition, but nothing we saw out there really blew us away.  Optimism is still running fairly high.

Domainy Goodness

It looks like nobody has any issues with buying their wares from Drunken Development, so we've taken on that name officially (or as officially as you can without putting forth legal effort).  Note the shiny new domain name.  Smile.  Repeat as needed.

http://www.drunkendevelopment.com

Survey Time!

Quick update everyone. We are putting up a survey to iron out some final details about the flow the application and how you would like to see things. If you could give us your input we would greatly appreciate it. Feel free to add anything we missed or you think useful in the comments section or a message to us so that we can make this the most useful app possible.

A few more things checked off the list

Well worked throughout the holiday on a number of things. Many of them in the background with very little showing at the user level. As for the interface, I did add the Create New Snake window and a few changes to the menu.

As you can see it stil needs to be made pretty, add an icon fix some of the dialogs, things like that. The code behind it is solid and can be used elsewhere so I am happy with that part. We are on schedule to be done as soon as our hangovers wear off. Unfortunately that date changes from time to time :)