Just checking in :-)

This week has been somewhat non-standard, I've had lots of trouble sleeping, the average time I've been hitting the hay would be around 4-5am, so I've basically been getting about 4/5 hours sleep per night (If I'm lucky!) so I can't say I've been fully on task.

That said, I have completed a few tasks today which relate to the new library that I'm designing.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the programmer is going to cope with using my library, and I've tried to alter the way I design the library to accommodate for this.

Usually I'll write an executable program, such as a game, and I'll really concentrate on the bones of the program before I consider how the user will interact with the program, this was a serious mistake on my part and so I'm really trying to put this right, before it wasn't much of a problem because these things can be left to the end of the development cycle when you're talking about games and simple applications, but when you're talking about libraries, making sure that the programmer can use the tools you give them is actually the biggest priority there is, that aside from it working.

Therefore, I have spent a good part of my day writing out how I would like the library to 'look' to the programmer, the various ways I would like the programmers to declare the GUI, create menus, and controls to go on those menus, then how to handle events and finally how to remove the GUI components or even the entire GUI from memory when it's finished with. This has allowed me to assimilate my ideas and create a draft interface for the system, hopefully I can now pair this interface with the backend stuff I have envisioned and modelled in class diagrams.

In a nutshell I've been able to design a 'face' for my GUI library today, I've got a set of methods that I personally deem desirable (however I am getting some consultation from peers on that front, after all I live in a house of computing students, why not make the most of it? )

Once I have come up with my final designs for the interface, and I've had it evaluated by my peers, I will then attempt to pair up that design with the core data structure I have planned out 'under the hood', after that's done I can start designing the implementation and I start looking for errors that need to be handled in the background so the user doesn't have to.

I'm very much looking forward to making a new video and presenting my progress, hopefully university will be kind to me and I will get some hours in the day to work each night, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.

All of that aside, I still feel I'm not putting full effort into the project, there are many other things I wanted to put into this blog which I haven't completed, which is a little disappointing, hopefully I will sleep a little better thus allowing me to be a bit more productive in the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading my blog, your participation is much appreciated :-)

Mike.