Day 9 of 30

On the ninth day…

From the different posts in the 30dayers site one can gather that everyone involved in this sprint is really putting in 100% effort in producing high quality applications. I think when there is an achievable objective, anyone with enough motivation can achieve it, not only in producing software but in any endeavour.

Early today I can say that I’ve finished all the features I want to include in this first release. They are as follows:

• client management - a bit more work needed here. I need to separate individual clients from business or corporate clients. It just makes more sense especially in generating analysis reports.
• contact management - just have to add a pop-up window for selecting the clients. I initially thought of having the client names in a drop down combo box but decided against it because of the possibility of having a large number of clients.
• product management - at the moment only digital products and services can be recorded. Future plans include the option to record non-digital products such as books, merchandises, etc.
• sales management - it took me a while to figure out how to handle a single sale and multiple item sales but in the end I figured it out.
• subscriptions management - these refer to those products/services that have a subscription mode of payment rather than one-off.
• issues management - these are items relating to the quality of the product of service. I initially thought of limiting it to bug reports but in the end there may be things that are not related to the actual software but some ancillary thing e.g. the help file or installation problems etc.
• actions management - these refer to activities taken towards the resolution of the issue or issues reported. This and the issues feature are almost in code freeze state (almost no more work is needed).
• table codes management - these are top-level codes that misvCRM needs and will be set to read-only when released.
• table items management - these are the sub-items relating to each table. The entries of this table can be updated or deleted. It is also possible to add a new item record.
• discount codes management - this is where different discount/coupon codes are maintained. I initially thought of leaving it to the user to specify the coupon or discount rate used when the item was bought but I think this can get tedious when there are several variations of the product available for purchase and each one have their own discount code.

I just have to cleanup the code and tidy up a few loose ends and I think I can make it available for download for those who want to take it through its paces. I just have to make clear that the final product may be the same or have additional more features. Anyway, this is something I have to think about when the time comes.

Another capability I added is that of being a multiuser (I know, it is not really a big deal) . I’ve made it in such a way that it is possible for the user to connect to the database via the Internet. The IP address of the middleware is shown on the caption of the application’s main window and an indicator of the type of connection is shown on the lower left corder of the main window. Here is a screenshot:

Another feature that I included when I made it multiuser is that depending on the licence the application can either connect to a remote database or to a local database i.e. residing on the same machine where the program is.

I think from now on it will be more fiddly in the sense of making sure everything hangs together and that the UI is consistent. An inconsistent UI is something that turns off users, I know I do.

That’s it for now. Till next time…