Sunday, March 31, 2002

State of the MOB I had taken a bit of a hiatus from the ] mob/">Mobile Offline Blogger project, but now am back on it with a vengeance. Designing the interface has been a serious challenge. My development work in the past has centered around server applications and specialized command-line tools being used by highly technical people. My design philosophy has always been to make these applications as configurable and flexible as practical. Interface considerations are important but secondary. With the Pocket PC as the target environment, the interface must come first. The screen is simply not big enough for large number of interface elements. A single screen for configuration options can display no more than a half-dozen items, a text-editing screen has room for just a couple of buttons. Suddenly I find myself removing features because of their UI requirements. Anyhow... The interface is nailed down at this point, and most of the interface glue has been in place since the begining. Today I have been working on proper wrappers for handling XML-RPC payloads, they should be feature-complete by Monday. HTTP transport routines were written for a previous test project, they just need to be integrated. Local storage is up next. With a little luck, Beta 1 should be available within a week. Category routing for Radio probably won't make the first release. [Bryce: Bryce's PDA Channel] 5:57:17 PM    [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "liveTopicsSeeAlso" hasn't been defined.]