Archive for the ‘Website’ Category

This week has been a little slower, though still productive. I’ve had a lot going on with the paying gig, and that takes precedence, unfortunately. I alos received notice that my host was shutting down my server, so I’ve had to quickly move everything to a new host. This included recoding some of the Laughing Dragon Games site to use MySql instead of Microsoft SQL Server.

Progress on StoryBox, though included a new home at StoryBoxSoftware.com. It’s not linked because it’s just a placeholder at the moment.

I added a single level outliner, so if you don’t like working with index cards, you can work in the outline. It will become multi-level eventually, but I wanted the basic feature in so I can start getting some feedback.

Project wide search went in this week, also. Eventually, I will add options for only searching document bodies, synopsis, notes or tags separately or in any combination, and the option to search in any particular set of documents.

One other last change was to swap out the ribbon bar for a regular menu and toolbars. Why? Well, it turns out if you want to use that ribbon bar UI, you have to get a license from Microsoft, and then follow a bunch of guidelines. You also can’t use it on anything that directly competes with any of the Microsoft Office products, including Word. I do not know if they would consider StoryBox as a direct competitor to Word, and since I’m in a hurry to release this thing, I don’t want to go any further with the ribbon bar only to find out later that I can’t use it at all, even if I did want to follow all their technical requirements.

I’m on target, I think, for an October 1 pre-release release. What that means, is that you’ll be able to buy it early for quite a bit less than what I’ll be asking once I tag it with Version 1.0. I haven’t settled on exact final numbers yet, but the pre-release will be right around $25. Once version 1.0 rolls around, it will be significantly more.

So what’s the plan for this week? Mostly tightening up the features that are already in and working on the website.

Ah Yeah – new blog software here, too! Unfortunately, lost the comments, but what the hell, there weren’t that many anyway. I’ll get the music back up here, too, in a bit. I gotta do real work now, though.

You can now get here by going to http://www.markfassett.com. How cool is that. I figured one of my alternate selves would have taken it already.

I haven’t been updating my other blogs much, for the very reason that the topics they cover either aren’t of much interest to me any more, or the projects aren’t being worked on for whatever reason, mostly because they aren’t of enough interest to keep me working on them, and I haven’t had much to say.

This one, however, is going to be just a random crap blog. Whatever I’m doing, I’ll probably mention it here. If I have political thoughts, they will go here. If I have books I’ve read that I want to talk about, you’ll find that discussion here. Here, you will also find my explanation as to why Infinite Suns isn’t getting done.

The reason? I don’t want to code anymore, at least not on my free time. I do contract work for Machineworks Northwest, and I spend a lot of time doing it, and it pays pretty well. I’ve worked on various games including Duke Nukem Arena and Guitar Hero III for mobile phones. When I’m done working on those games, at the end of the day, I just don’t want to code, and coding in my free time is the only way Infinite Suns would get done.

So with the copious free time that I have (about 4 hours a night), I am instead going to spend the time building stuff out of wood in my garage. The majority of that stuff is likely to be guitars. There will probably be some furniture as well, as Wendy has some things she wants. I’m sure that list will be never ending.

If you’re wondering if I will ever get back to working on Infinite Suns, the answer is a definite I don’t know. Maybe. It will depend on how well I do at building guitars. If my guitars aren’t shit, and I can sell them at a price and quantity that allows me to make them for a living, then perhaps Infinite Suns will see the light of day. But as long as I’m coding for a living for someone else, I don’t think it will happen.