Driven by features, that’s my to do list.

The final behind-the-scenes implementations to get the patterns something that can be in or out of stash has been finished – changes to both the importer and the exporter. They can be non-trivial pieces of code to maintain, sometimes – the importer especially can be a beast in terms of readability (and this is after I refactored the sucker) – but I feel like the benefit is worth it. I strongly believe that after the user has gone through all this trouble to enter in their data, it should be available to them in a form that they can take with them. Whether that’s because they don’t like my app (I hope not) or it’s 20 years down the road and it’s time for something different or whatever, it should be in a human readable, sensible format that’s portable.

I’d actually forgotten I’d done some of the work on the importer on Monday and was really not looking forward to diving back into that piece of code, so it was a pleasant surprise to open up the file and realize that I only needed to make a few more changes in order for it to work with the changes I had decided on for the exporter.  Thanks, Monday Me!

Tomorrow there’s a whole host of items on the to do list – how do I display the information about finishes for patterns, for example, and do I show how many of x are called for by the number of patterns marked as kitted? Plus the whole “marking a pattern as complete” bit still has a number of things that need implementing; I am currently thinking that I’ll put in a preference to allow the user to determine whether the app deducts things from the stash or they do it manually (easy enough to add, and will let folks who want to edit the stash as they go not lose the ability to mark things complete).  Dialog box to congratulate the user on the finish and explain, if necessary, what edits will be made to the stash and, oh, at some point, an in app help button will probably be useful.  Sigh.

Really, I am just avoiding the giant sea of white that is the current stitching in the current project, plus a host of other mundane activities. But tomorrow I will write more code, and the app will hopefully come very close to the point where it is ready to be released.

Then the real measure of its usefulness will come.