I’ve been going through the various lists of things to do, adding them to an Access database (Excel had a rather miserly limit on the amount of text you can put in a cell).
Why Access instead of NeoMem itself? Partially the lack of good import/export options. But also frustration at the UI and its brittleness. One annoyance - I have objects for both Abby and NeoMem projects, but linking to them is not straightforward, because NeoMem expects links to all be in one folder (these happen not to be). Also a lack of good filtering and sorting mechanisms for folder contents. There are other problems, all of which will be going into the list of needed improvements.
Anyway, this has been quite a project in itself, as there are so many ideas for future features, mostly in free-form text (lots and lots and lots there), but also on index cards, on regular paper, some via email, and some from the forum. It had also been somewhat low on my radar, since I’d been preferring to work on Abby when I had time for programming.
But this list is now at the top of the list of things to do. I’ll be posting the list as I go along.
And if anyone has any suggestions for how to manage such a list, I’d be happy to hear them. Making it interactive is essential. I like the look of Trac, but the installation and upgrading looks like a big time-sucker. Sourceforge seems a bit clunkier, but it might work. But since I’ll be putting Abby in Trac, I’d prefer to put NeoMem there as well just so people (including myself) don’t have to learn two different systems, though the only free hosting site I know of (python-hosting) requires the project to be in Python.
Here’s the list as it stands now, as pdf or Access mdb.
[Access had problems exporting it as HTML so I printed it through PrimoPDF, a useful thing to have installed (and free)]
This list is not complete yet. I did attempt to give some order to when things might be done by assigning them to future versions, so with a little grouping the report could produce a nice roadmap.
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September 26th, 2005 at 8:59 am
Michael Vogel
Pictures! I would like to add Bitmaps into the pages - like it is done in Maple from Crystaloffice (after that I would need an import function to get all data from Maple;)
October 6th, 2005 at 6:48 am
Kevin
Great to hear work is continuing! Import/Export is the main reason I dont use NeoMem right now… I’m not going to convert all my data if I cant get it back out! Oh, and also, the link to the pdf gives me an error.
Kevin
October 6th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
bburns
oops, didn’t have permissions set properly on the folder… i didn’t realize you needed to let people have Execute permission just to read a file (?).
and yes, neomem definitely needs more export abilities.
October 8th, 2005 at 8:22 am
jf
Brian, if you re-post your feature list with a number assigned to each, we could sort of vote our top 5 buy sending you a list of numbers.
October 8th, 2005 at 8:52 am
bburns
jf - good idea, and would also help in discussing features and bugs.
it would be really nice to eventually have an interactive feature list with a built in voting system.
October 8th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Misha Rybalov
For managing to-do lists, I’ve been using VIP Organizer (http://www.vip-qualitysoft.com/products/organizer/) and I’ve found it quite helpful. You can categorize and sub-categorize all the items as well as give them different priorities and it has extensive filters so you can quickly see the most important tasks you need to get done.
- Misha
Automated Testing Guy
http://www.autotestguy.com
October 11th, 2005 at 7:03 am
bburns
thanks misha, interesting program with a nice interface - too bad it’s not open source
i’ll probably wind up using an access database, and then slowly attempting to use neomem to manage its own development process - should help drive the addition of lots of much needed features.