Part of the data I want to log and show are my activities. I’ve wrecked my brain trying to think of an easy but digital way of keeping track of my activities during the day. That data should consist of a time stamp and of course my activity. I imagined an application which would run either on my PDA or on my mobile phone. I would have to be really easy to work with as I’ll be using it for two whole weeks on a constant basis. I was thinking of a drop-down menu or combo-box which would hold all my possible activities (hmm, is that possible). Once I’d have selected an activity it would be stored on the device together with a time stamp indicating the current time. The next morning I would download the data from the device and integrate it with other data collected the previous day. Sounds simple right?
My first thought was Excel, as this is an easy way to store structured data and output it in different formats. But the power of my pocket Excel is limited and after some time I realized that you can’t use VB Script so that solution went down the drain.
By chance I realized that Flash (dear Flash) can also store persistent data. This wasn’t something I had worked with before but it sounded promising and I could use it on my Nokia. At first I developed a desktop version. When I got that working (sorting the collected data proved to be the most difficult task) I discovered that I couldn’t use the combo-box component on my Nokia, it wasn’t supported. But thankfully there are geniuses out there who made custom components for handheld devices! After I’d finally set them up other parts of my AS3 code weren’t working on Flash Lite, which supports AS2. But after a about a days work I can’t get the application to really store all the data. The sorting again is a problem (1, 10, 11, 2) pfffff. So this afternoon I made the very uncharacteristic decision to give up this application. Time is pressing. I still have to build… everything really.
So now I feel quite relieved and have decided I’ll use pencil, paper and my watch to collect my activities.