I don’t know what has been suggested so far. But I think I might have a few ideas. The obvious one that probably was already thought of is to either make it so they turn into a list by subject and date rather than just having them all in one giant open log. Maybe have a little tab next to each entry to expand and retract it. A word search that will show the entry dates and subjects that contain that word to let you see related dreams. Like if I was to type in ‘mall’, every dream where I mentioned a mall would pop up in a list and I can use those tabs to expand them and read if I needed to. I suggest the ability to export into HTML form or something like that. That would make it really easy to share them rather than using copy paste. Maybe for each dream have fields that you can type in certain things like characters, settings, mood. Stuff like that. And then it can be organized into pie charts and stuff like that to show common themes in dreams.
Edit: Looking up at the others, it looks like the ideas I had were already suggested. Except for the tabs maybe.
Instead of having those arrows to fold whole panels, make them resizable frames like in most mail clients. (Outlook, Pegasus Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird…)
If I click on Characters, will it go to Add/Edit, View/Search or stay where it is? I recommend View/Search.
“Add/Edit” makes no sense. If you want to edit something, you need to find it first. I suggest “Add”.
“View/Search” is too much text when they’re basically the same thing. I suggest “Browse”.
Just a quick thing. Will there be a general table-of-contents on this site in case you wanted to look at a particular date? If not, would you have to use the “Search” function? Just personal preference, but maybe you could have something of a drop-down menu where you could select days by year, then month, then date with the Title of the dream following the date. That way, a person could quickly get to the day they want without having to figure out the format of the Search funcion.
This is interesting.
Personally, I’d love to see it. I’ve wanted to have a Dream Journal I can type up on my computer, but for some reason I don’t want to use Word.
I like your revised sketches Arthur. A drop-down menu like the one suggested by Amé would also be nice. I also suggest that there be a Title Screen that would also include the number of LDs you’ve experienced in the current month. Let me know when you have more updates or when you have actually written the software. You seem to be on the right track and I like the idea.
Amen, so many programs depend on windows this microsoft that. its hard to get anything exe to run over here. which is why it is so much nicer if it is somthing simple. and even better if it is released under GNU licence more copys/better versions of it will spawn up all over!
Not to mention the people who take the code and tweak it to their likeing. perfect example is the bash shell, and alias’s. I know people who like “ls --color=tty” and others who hate that alias.
I was planning to code it up in C# using Visual Studio .Net… Though I haven’t entirely decided yet… If there’s a demand for it to be portable, I may use Java… but I’m not a big C++ fan myself.
I’ve never used realBasic… would it take long to learn? (for a fourth year computer science major)
[edit: just looked it up… and i’m not sure if I could afford the $100 price tag ]
That isn’t modifying code; it’s just changing a config file (.bashrc). If Bash was commercial, you would be able to change that too. It just reads a sort of initialization script.
OK, I’ve decided to code this in Java, that’ll allow for good portability, and I’m more familiar with Java anyways. I’ve started to do a little coding, but I’m doing the GUI last, so there won’t be much to release for a while…
only thing I can think of is the ability to export to text format. like each one of the dreams in the database be able to export into text format or whatnot. and the ability to save it as one chunk file. (like test.dream would be the whole dream database in one file. with an optional ability to export to {folder} / {filename1.txt filname2.txt etc})
I don’t know how one would do this in Java (I’ve forgotten everything I learnt in Java) But speach recognition would be good to experiment with, record dreams in bed. That setting would be excelent for the few lucky people with tablet PCs. There are some problems, computers my have trouble understanding sleepy people. Speech recognition isn’t too good to start with unless you have a professional speech recognition engine.
Also for the same purpose you could make a night setting to darken everything for anyone wanting to use it at night.
Could you post us the format of the database so if anyone else wants to write their own, for different platforms like Palm and PocketPC, they can make it compatible with yours.
WOW! Speech recog. in Java?!?!?! Man, if u can do that, then u far exceed my programming abilities. I would love to have that feature, but I don’t know much about speech recognition. I’ve experimented with it a bit, but don’t you need to personalize it for every person? Maybe not I’m not sure. I would be happy without it too though. …wow…
No, I didn’t write it too clearly I can’t use speech recognition in Java. But I can in Vb and .net but that’s easy. Microsoft provide an easy to use control to interface with some engines. The ms speech recog engines are useless. I was using SAPI 4.1 I think. It’s probably old now.
Arthur: If somebody hasn’t already said this, I suggest download Alchera’s free trial. You can get a LOT of good idea’s from this. I am not willing to pay money for a dream journal, so the best of luck to you
a few thing i didn’t like about the looks of the program:
the buttons on the left should be limited to three; home/stats, dream, search
within the stats menu, you see 3 tabs. one general, one with a list of all your dreams, and one tab where info on the selected entry in tab 2 is displayed.
on the dream menu, you have 4 tabs. list, view, make, edit. the 2 first following the same approach as in the stats area. the next 2 are pretty much self explanatatory.
the search menu gives only one tab, with the search engine. however, when you use the search function, it shows a new tab for the results.
that about sums up how i feel the program should look like. and a way to make the program darker would be appreciated. i know i don’t like to watch a white screen for several minutes every morning.
I’ve coded up all the storage classes and have the ability to add custom statistics. I’m currently setting up some pretty sweet search functionality as well. I have yet to put all this through very much testing, that’s not the fun part, but I’ll get to it soon.
Once that’s all working nicely, I still need to figure out a way to recognize all the links inside the text, although I don’t expect that to be too difficult. Then I’ll code up all the export formats, which should be easy. Followed by a GUI to use all this in a nice way, which hopefully will be beta release one. I’ll be sure to post when that’s ready. Since I only work on this in my spare time, that may be a while yet.
Absolutely, I have plans to allow you to export your journal into many formats.
I’ve never done anything with speech recognition, so it’s probabky a little out of my league, at least for the first release. I’ll try to make it easy to add in for future releases though, sounds like it would be a really nice feature.
It would be easy enough to allow the “look and feel” of the program to be customized by the user, allowing for darker interfaces for those who would want them.
I was planning on using serialized objects to persist the dreams, rather than a traditional database, so you may be able to read those in on another machine… However for backup purposes, I was going to write the entire journal to XML, which would be far easier to work with… But I haven’t decided entirely on the format yet.
I like the idea of opening a new tab for different search results.
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I can’t use speech recognition in Java. But I can in Vb and .net but that’s easy. Microsoft provide an easy to use control to interface with some engines. The ms speech recog engines are useless. I was using SAPI 4.1 I think. It’s probably old now.
