5 Responses for "Creating shiny things"

1. sara_book June 5th, 2006 at 4:41 pm 1

   Just think -soon they’ll all be over for the summer, and you can procrastinate to your hearts content!

2. bigme June 5th, 2006 at 4:41 pm 2

   I need help on making a video recorder program, well not even that, just a program that schedules video recording. Let me explain.

   On my computer, I have a wintv card, and given my computer already has a hard disk of course, you can record tv to hard disk. Generally this works ok, give or take the program will take up to 30 seconds to load and start rolling, but the recording program is not really a problem and does a good job of being able to be invoked from the command line to do the user’s bidding.

   My problem is the interface for setting the timer is not very good. Not only is the interface poor, setting the duration is difficult, and that whole pre-roll problem we had earlier,but consider you wanted to record a series, say for example Dr who, which due to the vaguearies of BBC1’s scheduling is on at a slightly different time every week, whereas wintv scheduler will record something at the same time daily or weekly, this won’t be of much use, but looking up stuff on the radio times website and copying it down also sucks from a useability standpoint.

   The wintv scheduler program is itself very simple, all it is is a front end for the windows task scheduler service. Programming for which is easy enough in visual basic. Moreover it’s possible to get tv listings via an RSS feed, so it’s possible to give the users a display of the tv listings where they can click to record a program, or have it grep through for the users favourite programs or keywords to record.

   The challenges here are thus:
   display to the user human readable RSS output, make this clickable, and make an alorythm that formats this into a new scheduled task.

3. freso June 5th, 2006 at 6:01 pm 3

   And then when you actually have time to create shiny stuff, you’ve lost the inspiration/motivation/etc. to actually do it. At least, that’s what usually happens with me. :/

4. idigital July 24th, 2006 at 2:01 am 4

   Sounds easy enough, problem I’d have is that I’ve not written VB (or done any Windows development) in years. Like… 5 years.

5. bigme July 24th, 2006 at 10:47 am 5

   me neither :(