Sunday, January 18, 2009

My Collection - 1.3.* Progress

I've been plugging away on two of the most requested features - User Created Categories and Categories by Type.

I have to create a table for categories and associate the movie to the category. That part is done. I event seed the table with movie categories from IMDB, Game categories from IGN, and Book categories from Amazon.

The next step is to build the set of screens to maintain the categories. Once this is done, I need to tweak the import process and export process since category is no longer kept in the movie table as text.

Then I need to build an update script for the database to handle converting old categories to new categories (the tables changes are done, I just need to update old data).

Hopefully I'll have this out sometime next weekend. After categories, I'll build in CD's and ship the first 1.3.0 release. I might have to combine movies back into a single tab rather than DVD/Blu-Ray. I'm running out of screen space...

Someone needs to build bigger Android devices...

4 comments:

  1. Ooh, and I was just hunting down this blog to ask for user categories. (and for a way to personally turn off "games" and "blu-ray" tabs, since they're empty...)

    Additional thoughts:
    * barcode scanner should be able to automatically select the "book" category if the barcode is in 978 - that's the "bookland" ean country code after all.
    * ISBN as a book lookup type? (so when the upc turns out to be old-style, and fails, I don't have to hand-checksum a 978 code out of it...)
    * This may not fit what you're trying to build, but: how about a way to specify *where* a book is? (living room, bedroom, at work...) Slightly different semantics than "loan", maybe.

    (Yes, I worked on some homebrew library/loan code ages ago; didn't get very far on the UI side, though...)

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  2. @Mark,

    I like your idea about auto-checking the barcode from a check-digit perspective to get a high-level type.

    I'm going to have to combine the DVD and BluRay type back into a single movie tab for 1.3.* anyhow. Once I get the categories working, I'm going to start building a preferences system so I'll do things like:

    Show Movies Tab
    Show Game Tab
    Show Book Tab
    Show CD Tab
    Default Tab: Movies

    I'm hoping to really polish the usability in 1.3 and not add too many features. Also, the next version of Android is due to push to all T-Mobile phones and I'm waiting on a new API version to take care of some other feature requests. Some things are just not easy to do or cost to much from a performance standpoint.

    Thanks for the feedback!!!!

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  3. I think there a way for you to make one movie tab, but when you long hold the tab a menu will pop up asking if you want to see DVD or Blu-ray....Is this even possible?

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  4. @DreamcastDC

    Yes that is possible and falls in-line with what othe people have been asking me about adding other filter types. I think I'll hold off on something like that until I get 1.3 squared away a little better but I like your idea!!!

    ReplyDelete