Saturday, October 14, 2006

FoodThinger is almost code complete

FoodThinger, my free food storage tracking/management software is almost code complete. (For non-programmers, that means I'm almost done writing it.) I'm sure I'll still have plenty of bugs to work out, but the bulk of the coding and database creation is almost done. Currently it runs on windows xp/2000, but should run on Linux since it's written in java on top of sqlite.

In case anyone is interested, I will need alpha/beta testers to try out the software and give suggestions. If you are interested, go to http://www.pingerthinger.com and send me an email from the contact page. (Sorry to make that a little complicated, but I've been having spam trouble lately.)

I would welcome help coding, although there isn't much left to do at least before alpha. I could use help designing a component to display a series of bar graphs, and if anyone really understands swing, I have a few questions there too... I hope to get this up on source forge after alpha, so collaboration should be easy at that point.

Current Features:
  • add the foods you bought for your food storage
  • automatically knows expiration dates for common food storage items
  • automatically knows how much is in a #10 can for common food storage items (weight)
  • creates a food storage plan based on your family
  • Reports: what is expiring in the next N months, how close you are to meeting your food storage goals, how much of each food you have left to buy
  • add new foods to the database
  • Export to file what you have in your food storage (this way if someone decides a spreadsheet is more to his or her liking he can "get his information back out")
Features still to come before alpha:
  • printing- print reports mentioned above, print list of where various foods are stored
  • bar graph- visually showing how far you have to go before you reach the goal. A graph lets me have a better idea of how well I'm doing than seeing that I have 24% of my grains. (If I can't get this working reasonably soon, I might just start testing without it.)
  • Installer - I'm sure most people do not want to be messing with jar files themselves
  • Documentation - I'd like to think my program is intuitive and it is, to me :)

The database creation was the biggest pain, so if someone just wants the database, I'm glad to share it.

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