This week has been quite a slow and frustrating week. The weekend was spent updating a few things on the website and updating Code Collector. The plan was to get all that up on Tuesday, unfortunately a problem with my internet connection meant that it was impossible to get the stuff online reliably. So Wednesday was spent sorting out Code Collector but I managed to get started on Minim again Wednesday afternoon, though half the week had already gone.
Unfortunately these things happen in any profession and all you can do is make the best use of the time you have remaining. So in that time I’ve been working on getting the file management further along. Groups are now working and data is being imported from various files including GarageBand 08 files. The final job is drag and drop which I’ve started to implement but isn’t finished yet. With any luck this will be finished by the end of the weekend.
The future or now?
I was required to make a choice yesterday about the structure of the file management system under the hood. All files had some shared metadata (the name, date, etc.) and then the various file specific metadata. So my first thought was to put all the common stuff in a single entity and then have another entity that contains the various other file attributes (for those who don’t know about databases, an entity is a group of objects, for example Songs or Files).
When I got round to planning what data to show for each group I realise that many of the custom bits of file info are used in multiple groups and there weren’t all that many different bit of info. Now it’s all too easy for developers to think ahead and design something that they don’t need now but may be easier in the future. This is almost always a bad thing. It overcomplicates things today and your needs may change in the future so what you designed may not work as well. It’s far better to think about now than to think about several months from now, especially as the development tools today allow you to make changes fairly quickly.
Unfortunately that’s all for this week, it’s been rather uneventful. Hopefully technical problems won’t get in the way next week and I’ll have something more interesting to talk about, and hopefully some screenshots.
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