So… guess this is my first blog post. I’ve always wanted to start a blog because I’ve always had ideas swirling around in my mind that I wanted to talk about, as well as my progress on my current projects. I also wanted some place to talk about how some of my bigger projects work. Maybe in an official documenation page rather than a blog post, heh.
Oh, speaking of projects, these are my current projects that I’m working on so far:
- Timeway, an Onenote replica which is purposed towards journalling and taking small notes. You can also explore your computer files in a retro world. It’s hard to explain haha.
- Sketchiepad, basically just a framework/library (if you can call it that) where you can easily create sprite-based animations with code in Processing 3.5.4.
- I’m also doing an electronics project with a friend to make his plushie make sounds when it’s thrown around with a BBC Micro:bit.
- I guess this website also counts as a project :v)
Right now my main focus is Timeway since my brain is bursting with ideas for it, and since I’m using it to keep a journal of how my day’s been and notes and stuff.
Originally, I used Onenote to keep notes about the day, plonk down stuff like notes and to-do lists within my Journal. Journalling with Onenote is actually pretty great, you can place images, text, reposition it whereever you want in the page, and make it all pretty with colours and styles. However, there were a couple issues:
First, Onenote notebooks are uploaded to the cloud instead of being stored on your device (apart from caching). We probably all know that Microsoft is pretty nosy with our data, and there could potentially be sensitive information in this journal. Big yikes.
Secondly, there were some missing features that I wanted in Onenote that I wanted, and I’m also concerned about the longevity of my journal; I want them to be accessible 10 years, maybe even 100 or a billion years from now. At any point, Onenote could be discontinued, or updated in such a way that old notebooks aren’t supported anymore. I’d like it so that any notes, no matter what version of Timeway they’ve been created in, can be opened with a modern version. And even if they can’t, they’re saved in a simple format so they’re easily recoverable.
Oh, I’d also like it to have a better file explorer since the one in Windows, for lack of a better term, is horrible (seriously, if I search for a file in the search bar, the window just freezes up). I’d also like a cool abstraction of the file system in the form of a retro 3D world where you can view your files as objects in the world.
See, told ya it’s hard to explain!
I’ve already written about 6,900 lines of code (including comments and whitespaces), so I’d say this project is past its earliest stages. Nevertheless, it’s still very much a work in progress and I still need to put it up on Github.
I think that’ll be all for today, cheerio.