So my plan to take small steps, and start out really simple, only to work toward something bigger, has paid off. I actually have an application out there, and people are downloading it, trying it out.
Due to its simplicity people usually only try it out once, and then no more, but that’s perfectly fine by me, since I rarely use it either. After all, it’s not exactly a tool you need very often, so why should people use it much? 
However, I’m now going to start working toward making it a better tool, and one that people can hopefully use more than just once or twice. The first step will be to implement preference support, as that will form the basis for profiles. This will come in very handy in the future, when the tool will allow people to count calories and track their weight using this tool. I want to be able to support multiple users in the same app, so that families that wants to start counting calories together, can do so without having to get several devices.
What’s in the future for this app? Well there’s a LOT that can be done, and I’m full of ideas, but I’m still pacing myself, taking things one step at the time. So preference and profile support first, then we’ll see.. I may add a few extra items to v0.5, but that will only happen if I deem them to naturally belong together.
Well this is a rather pleasant surprise. I hadn’t honestly expected to finish this version while I was at vacation, but obviously I managed to do just that.
Visually not a whole lot has changed. There’s a new icon, and the entry forms are now using tables for layout instead of the normal linear layout. A new calculation has been added to the application, offering an alternative calculation of ideal weight.
Other than that, a single bug was fixed, and a small internal change to allow reuse of some of the code in other projects was made.
The newest version of the application has been released now, a few days later than I’d planned for, but that’s still acceptable by my measures. I’ll post more about it tomorrow, but for now, I really need to get some sleep.
I’ve been working on the next release of Calorie Calculator for a couple of days now, and so far I’m liking what I see.
I believe I’ve made some good changes to the interface, that will make it easier to figure out, and I’ve set up some additional usage data reporting, which will enable me to more easily track down errors in the software. Continue reading →
Wow… It sure has been a while since I last wrote anything in this blog. I would claim I’ve just been busy, but quite frankly that would be a lie… I just haven’t really been doing anything related to programming that I felt was worth writing about. Mainly I’ve doing lots of other work, but meh, this isn’t about me. 
So this new project… What’s it about? Does it actually do anything useful? And… Android?!? These are questions you may or may not have, but I’m going to answer then anyway, because I’m weird like that. Continue reading →
Like CakePHP, Yii is initially a bit confusing, but it’s also exciting, and so you keep going, wanting to explore deeper.. But the main difference, to me anyway, is that when the excitement fades, to no longer cloud your judgement, Yii has become an understanding and caring friend, while CakePHP leaves you wondering… Was the cake a lie after all?
Bad.. I know.. ^^ Couldn’t help it.
I’ve been working with Yii for a while now, and my original, positive opinion of it, has only gotten stronger since then, to the point where I feel comfortable starting on one of my larger, paying projects in it. I’ve decided to write down my progress as I move along, hopefully resulting in a tutorial, to complement the Yii Blog tutorial. I’m not sure why it’s always a blog tutorial with these frameworks, maybe because so many would like their own blog, or maybe because they cover a lot of the basic elements, but personally I would like to see more advanced tutorials, that better showed off the depths of the framework, but that’s one of the reasons I really like Yii.. I feel like I can actually make a difference, and help out with it. Continue reading →
I think that most developers have small projects, be they pet projects, or just ones made to test a specific programming language / framework, to get to know it more in depth by using it more practically, making the experiences that are often needed to make decisions, and avoid common pitfalls when working on larger, possibly commercial projects.
Personally I’m all for source control, but there are cases where my goals are not so much to keep a strict versioning information about the files, but rather just to make sure I have the source backed up, and I’m able to work on it from both my desktop workstation, and my laptop, without a lot of hassle, and while I normally prefer Subversion for my versioning needs, I find that it’s like shooting birds with a cannon when it comes to small projects.. It works, but it’s a lot of unnecessary work, especially since I’m the only one working on the project, I don’t need to do extensive testing of it before I commit the source. It also happens sometimes, that I forget to commit the changes when moving from one computer to the other, meaning I’ll either have to resolve conflicting commits later, or find another way to get it done.. Continue reading →
For a long while now, I’ve been trying to approach CakePHP, and have somewhat enjoyed working with it, but it has been a long and rather troublesome path. CakePHP is a great framework, that much is certain, but it kept getting in my way, being a bit too automagic for my tastes, bugging me down with a lot of requirements in regards to conventions, and while those are good for many things, I found them to be in my way.
So when Daniel Hofstetter wrote about other possible frameworks, I decided to check them out, and I fell in love with one of them. Namely Yii Framework, which is another PHP framework based on the MVC design, and it has a lot of features that I like, but what I love about it is, that it took me only 2-3 days to understand how it’s all connected, and while CakePHP has a really nice community of people ready to try and help, with Yii, it seems that the main developer spends a lot of his time helping, getting people up and running with the framework, which I assume will enable the users to start helping with support, although I must admit that the documentation is excellent, and whenever a sensible suggestion to the documentation is made, it is carried out rather fast, usually within a few hours.
Now that I have a tool I feel comfortable using, I’ll probably start updating again more.
I’ve been reading up on the CakePHP documentation (as I have mentioned a few times before), and I’ve noticed that there are some sections missing from it. Not a whole lot, but enough that one can miss some things. I have also noticed a lot of people complaining about it, or at least commenting on it, but I’m of the belief that one shouldn’t complain about things that one can change, and since they enable people to edit the manual, I’m determined to do so once I feel secure enough in my knowledge of CakePHP.
That being said, I’m almost done reading the manual, or the bits I need anyway, so I’m going to get started on the actual development. Also, a quick side-note here.. The Containable behaviour is brilliant and quite definitely one I’m going to use for my projects.
Posted in CakePHP, PHP
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Tagged CakePHP, manual, PHP
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