a rather productive day

I feel pretty damn good about the changes I made to iRooster today. I finally settled on a new design for the Alarm Editor (a picture of the old design is the link there). It’s a little bit more complex, but not too much. Also, this is rather unavoidable since I’m adding more stuff to what you can actually do with alarms (for the curious: this would be wake-from-sleep and repeating alarms).

A particularly needed change that was just implemented today was the removal of two of those NSStepper controls on the alarm editor. The interface looks far less cluttered with only one left. A beautiful–and thoroughly unexpected–bonus of removing two of those NSSteppers was that the code responsible for managing time changes became substantially less complex. Of course, Objective C’s management of selectors through the SEL datatype, along with the -performSelector:withObject: method saved me a lot of energy too.

On a non-technical note, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday was spent criticizing the implementation of Six-Sigma with my friend Amanda over dinner, and discussing life on the East Side of Seattle with her boyfriend.

Saturday was far more involved, but not bad by any means. I saw a documentary entitled Bonhoeffer, which had been playing at the U of Minnesota’s U Film Society. I worked for a while after that, hung out with my two of my token Asian friends, Stef and Kari (sheesh, it was a joke). I ended up hanging out with another friend, Lori, later that night. We ended up going to a house party around 1am. Everyone present was hot, tired, sweaty, and thoroughly drunk. Shortly thereafter we changed our minds about being present, took Stef, and went to Pizza Luce. For the record, anyone visiting Minneapolis should definitely check it out at least once. It’s easily the best pizza in the Twin Cities.

Sunday was, once again, uninvolved. I didn’t get up until 2:30 in the afternoon (god, I love being done with school). I hung out at the Purple Onion, worked on iRooster (hence the first half of this blog entry), and a good three or four hours of work for Honeywell too.

I have yet another demo on Tuesday of my project, and I’ve been working very, very dilligently in reimplementing the entire damned thing in C# (as opposed to VB6). The upside of using C# (besides the fact that I actually feel really comfortable with the language) is that its class library isn’t psychotic, which I feel is the case with VB6. Unsurprisingly, work has progressed far more rapidly and smoothly in C# than it ever did in Visual Basic. Mind you, I’m not knocking VB. It’s really great for some stuff, and I’m sure that if I had actually spent as much time working with VB as I have with C/Objective C and C# I would probably come to appreciate it. Nevertheless, for the time being I find it frustrating and limiting in the strangest ways.