I need a project.

[Nick]

I need something to work on thats less frustrating the wading though the quagmire that is drupal. I like drupal, its powerful and flexable but its a beast.

What useful project could I take on in flex to keep myself at least somewhat familiar with it?

[Brad]

Make Courtney a movie database?

[Nick]

In flex? Ok. That sounds easy and I can tie it to some PHP ajax fun. Can his phone view flash? I guess I will have to find out how to make flash for mobile devices.

[Brad]

iPhones can't view flash content. Something about nobody needing to by crappy games from apple if they can get all the games they want for free.

If being viewable from an iPhone is a requirement I guess you better pick a different project.

[Nick]

Dang. Thats dumb.

[zourtney]

I bet I could put linux on it...Then nothing would work!

[Nick]

My next phone will be a linux phone. Its actually a viable option now. And by then phones will be more them powerful enough to run a web server and other fun things.

But that sucks. I guess I could make both a flex and a html version.

[Brad]

I just thought of another project that would cool to make. I need a database to keep track of the books I own, the book's I've read,the book's I've read but would like to own and the book's I haven't read I'd like to read. I could also keep track of book's I've loaned out or am borrowing.

Obviously it'd be database driven. It could be written in Flex which would make it web-able. That would force you to have a server however (unless you made it into an air application) which would limit it's use to other people. Unless you had a main server and multiple people used the same book tracking software/database.

For some reason however, I'm not sure I want other random internet knowing every single book I own or read. Maybe that's just me being weird but I'd want to be able to select which books I want to list publicly. I'm not sure why I feel this way, I mean It isn't like I read embarrasing books or anything, it just seems very invasive for random internet peoples to be able to find out that much about me (I wouldn't care if it was just my friends and family).

If this doesn't interest you, I might pick it up to do myself. I'm thinking it'd be something good to do to teach myself C# with. It'd be easier than the image project anyway. You could make the web interface version and I could make the desktop version haha.

[Nick]

This is almost the same as the movie tracker. One could easily make a program to do all that with both books and movies. Sounds like something to keep me in practice, and fairly easy. Most of the work will me making it usable.

[Brad]

Yeah it would be very similar. The only difference would be in what data fields you want to display and search on.

It'd be easy enough to make a program which does both books and movies. Probably the best idea.

Any other similar media types somebody would want to track? The only other ones I can think of are audio books and graphic novels (comic books).

[zourtney]

I'd definitely be in to this. I was thinking about books and other media earlier. Personally, I'd love to keep a music list. Not the music I have, but the music I would like to buy. Right now, I keep this in giant google-docs spreadsheet (so I can access I mobilely). It has about 250 rows, each being a band I'm interested in looking in to. I would very much like a better way to store and search this.

I have started a similar book list, but haven't kept it up. So yeah, I'm definitely interested in this.

[Brad]

Hmmm.... I guess a music wish list would fit, however I think a full-blown music tracker is a lost closer to the image project. You'll want to track what songs you have, what album they are in and be able to play them (probably no need for a full music player with playlists and whatnot, but you're gonna want to be able to listen to your files to tell what they are.

The difference between the book/movie tracker and image program is that the image program is tied directly to files located on your computer and is all about organizing your collection while the book/movie tracker is not tied to any files and is about tracking your non-digital collection.

I guess as long as you keep it the same as books/movies (not tied to files on your computer) you could track your CD collection (or Vinyl records) as well as what CDs you want to buy or have loaned to a friend.

That leaves us with the following media types:

Books
Movies
Music
Audio Books

The next step seems to be determining what data fields we want for each of the different media types. What do you guys think?

[Nick]

I agree. Leave the digital music to the likes of winamp and itunes. But all those other would be nice to have tabs on.

[Brad]

If create a set database schema for this project we could work on the online and desktop versions separately and concurrently and both of them would be able to read each other's data.

Should we bust out some UML for this project? I'm guessing their is going to be a LOT of total data fields we're gonna want.

Also it'd be awesome if we had some sort of a web page scrapper which could read a website and rip off information about books or movies so that the user doesn't have to type all of them in (or even know all of them). IMDB would be the obvious choice for movies, but what would we use for books? Or CDs?

[Nick]

Don't take too much focus from the picture project

There is another service that will give you information about CDs (I remember whatever I was using to encode things with lame getting CD info)