Proxi Blog

An AirClick software user wrote me last night asking for some advice in customizing his software for a particular purpose and while I responded, I considered how to do accomplish the same thing in iNotify. Some of it would be easier given that you don’t have to muck around with plist files and such, but it also occurred to me that something very basic is missing from iNotify that would make it difficult to duplicate the functionality built in to the current AirClick software: saved variables.

The current AirClick software lets you set and test variables and conditionally execute a command based on the state of this variable. iNotify has the testing portion of this down by way of filters. But we don’t yet have the ability to store a variable conveniently. You could replicate AirClick’s functionality by writing something out to a file and filtering based on the contents of the file, but that seems icky. So, I’ll be adding a task that lets you save a persistent variable. We’ll place these values in the app’s preference file so they will live through a restart. Perhaps there will be more use to these variables than just testing to see if a switch was held for a long time or not.

All this leads me to the real topic I need to discuss, and that is complexity. The idea is to create and application that is both powerful and easy to ease. For simple tasks I want configuration to be a breeze. I don’t want the number of options available to overwhelm a user. But I don’t want to hamstring a power user by hiding the powerful options so it’s difficult for them. So please if you have any suggestions to help accomplish these aims let me know. In particular if something could be named better, described better or presented better, I want to hear about it!

I’ll be trying to wrap up v0.03 later today, more on that when the release comes.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 9:37 am and is filed under Feedback, Proxi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.