new programs planned

here's a short rant with random notes on what I missed on my ipaq
during the 2 weeks of holiday which was the first "hard" test for it:

- dictaphone
  I've just started working on this myself, but if anyone wants to help
  and/or join forces and/or point out that I'm reinventing the wheel,
  please do.
  
  in short, I want a small application that will record sound to .wav or
  .au while the record button is pressed, then encode the result to an
  .mp3 in the background when done.
  mostly, I'm fairly sure that .mp3 encoding in realtime is far beyond
  the capabilities of the ipaq, so it'll have to run in the background.
  I still want it, though, because .wav or .au just take up horrible
  amounts of space.

- sketchpad
  a simple paint program to make sketches (like small maps or such).
  touchscreen/pen are great for this, much better than a mouse. on the
  other hand, you only have one button and no keys to speak of, so I
  guess porting an existing app won't quite work.

- configurable "card" program
  I think I've played with all of the available PIM apps, from agenda,
  mingle, people and chronicle to storm. some of them are great, but
  none of them really make me happy.
  one of the main problems with *all* contact/addressbook apps is that
  the fields are never what you need. there's not enough phone number
  slots or no picture, a US-centric address block or something else.
  
  so I was thinking of a more generic approach, along the lines of
  storm's contact database, but going far beyond it.
  for those who don't know: storm has the fields in the contacts not
  hard-coded into it, but defined in an XML file. vi is all you need
  to add a 2nd email field or remove the notes textblock.
  
  my idea is to create a simple app that knows only one thing: cards
  or records or pages or whatever you want to call them. it doesn't
  know whether the cards are addresses, notes or tasks, because every
  record defines itself. obviously, XML is the tool of choice here.
  an example:
  
  <Card ID=1 Class=Contact>
   <Name Type=Text Index>Tom Vogt</Name>
   <Phone Type=Numeric>555-12345</Phone>
   <Mail Type=email>tom_at_lemuria.org</email>
   <Picture Type=image>/usr/share/images/tom.jpg</Picture>
  </Card>

  something like that. rough sketch. the app would only know that:
  
  * IDs are unique
  * Class is from a (user-definable) list
  * the various types used and how to display and edit fields of that type
  * templates - empty, user-defined cards with given fields, e.g. one
    template for addresses, one for notes, etc.
  * Index fields are special

  that's it. this way, every card defines itself, while remaining fully
  extensible (you can add/delete/edit every record). because of the
  class concept, you can still do things like a phone book, because it
  is as simple as "list the index field of all cards in the Contact
  class".

  comments? volunteers? I don't know much about the XML lib and API,
  for example.

-- 
http://web.lemuria.org/pubkey.html
pub  1024D/D88D35A6 2001-11-14 Tom Vogt <tom_at_lemuria.org>
     Key fingerprint = 276B B7BB E4D8 FCCE DB8F  F965 310B 811A D88D 35A6