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Well, I’ve been working on AE off and on since the last entry, but haven’t gotten around to entering new info here (been busy!)

The trip was interesting. I've been thinking of all kinds of things you could use AE for. Like, I was sitting in a restaurant in the mountains and wondered what others were around - users could submit to a restaurant list, rate them, do pics of them (maybe pics of the food and menu?), and then I could have requested a list of those restaurants within 5 miles, sorted by rating. Then could make a comment and rate (and take a pic, etc etc).

Also could be used for driving around a neighborhood and find out what's for rent or sale (maybe a revenue stream there? Charge Realtor to submit their listings).

The web site is almost ready to go. The Add/Find/View functions are all there and working nicely. I spent the weekend working on making it look sharp (colors, navigation, making the grid view look good and sortable, plus minor bug fixed).

I’ve also spent a lot of time getting the web off of the recordsets. Instead of calling the location data object layer, *EVERYTHING* now calls the .NET Service. This means that the same thing that serves up data to clients is the same as what the web uses. Which is REALLY good – all that stuff is in one place, so changes and such can take place there. Plus, the web site is basically now the baseline “client”. Hehehe, anyone could write the same web site, just using that service. Kinda cool, and what I’m trying to get to – the eventual goal is to be the definer of the technology (how it works and hangs, from an enterprise level), and the owner of the data. The rest of it (web sites, clients, whatever) can be written by third parties.

I’ve also finally registered www.AnnotatedEarth.com. I’m just camping the name right now, but hope by the end of the month to upgrade the package to dev on activehost (so I’ll get full .NET + SQL Server 2000)… so it will actually be LIVE! :)

For the most part, I need to test a bit more on the web, add some more web links (right now it just goes to mapquest, would like to do a few more) and fill it out (like location of the day, dev info, user setup, forums, etc.)

After that, I need to finish some clients up. I have a working MFC client (well, not working ATM as I made some slight XML/Service changes – they may not impact it, but I’m not sure). The next will be a VB, and then probably a C# .NET app (should be fairly easy, I hope, as I can rip stuff off from the web site to do that). Then I need to get it on at least one PDA. I’d like to do the Pilot, but don’t want to take the learning curve time, so will probably go with some CE-based device/pocket PC (same thing? Not sure…). I also need to get wireless locally, to test on a laptop. Hope Columbia has some wireless leaks downtown, need to check that out (or arrange for a access point somewhere downtown).

I’d like to go live with the web site soon, just to have it up and running, and to develop against. I’d also like to get a lot more locs. There’s some well know locs (like the SC capital, etc.) that I can enter. The web site itself should be usable – not really useful for the location-aware part of things, but as a straight waypoint registry, it works really nice.

I just wish I had more time to write this stuff – work’s been VERY busy the last couple of months, so I’ve only been able to work on AE on the weekends (usually to tired on weeknights to work on it). The only reason I’m working on a Monday is ‘cause I was so in the groove last night, really nailing this stuff. The big one this weekend was getting the web on top of the service. That had been a major annoyance, and what I considered a big architectural flaw.




ToDo:
- Voting
- Add hyperlink to all locs (let user enter)
- User setup
- User registration
- New “Find Loc” (have “Find Near” and just “Find”)
- Text for web
- Move group logic out of sp to location service. Allow a list to be passed into service. Validate against allowed groups for passed user, and then pass as additional part of where clause
- Add “My locations” to grpup search