Saturday, January 22, 2011
Visual Basic 2010 Express? OH YES.
Decided I'd break out the old-school VB skills, and it turns out there's a whole new programming interface. I'm adjusting to it pretty well, and it helps that there's a rather huge online community that supports development of applications. I figure that it would be nice to have an all-in-one application to manage this blogspotting deal, and here's the rundown on what I think it'd require:
- A webpage viewer. Clearly, the most important part. Since the .NET package includes a web browser, I don't think I need to worry about figuring out how to display the HTML.
- A textbox that allows input of blognames. It shouldn't require the http:// or the .blogspot.com parts, because the application will automatically concatenate the URL in the proper fashion when it sends the URL to the browser.
- An IRC Client, because those are useful. I'm not sure how I'd code one from the base up, so I'll just use a webpage locked in to a mibbit widget that's already configured to whatever channel I want to access.
- The ability to add/remove blognames to/from a list, which can be managed with ADD/REMOVE buttons and can be used in tandem with a GOTO button to send the learned URLs to the built-in webpage.
- The ability to import/export lists of blognames to and from .txt or another library/database file.
There are probably more features that are just as important, but this should be the skeleton of the project. I'm developing this for me, mostly, but if it's any good I think it'd be worth releasing to the public, right?
Your thoughts, please. What other features would you be looking for in something like this?
- A webpage viewer. Clearly, the most important part. Since the .NET package includes a web browser, I don't think I need to worry about figuring out how to display the HTML.
- A textbox that allows input of blognames. It shouldn't require the http:// or the .blogspot.com parts, because the application will automatically concatenate the URL in the proper fashion when it sends the URL to the browser.
- An IRC Client, because those are useful. I'm not sure how I'd code one from the base up, so I'll just use a webpage locked in to a mibbit widget that's already configured to whatever channel I want to access.
- The ability to add/remove blognames to/from a list, which can be managed with ADD/REMOVE buttons and can be used in tandem with a GOTO button to send the learned URLs to the built-in webpage.
- The ability to import/export lists of blognames to and from .txt or another library/database file.
There are probably more features that are just as important, but this should be the skeleton of the project. I'm developing this for me, mostly, but if it's any good I think it'd be worth releasing to the public, right?
Your thoughts, please. What other features would you be looking for in something like this?
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i would love a standalone app for this. i get by with firefox addons but it would be nice to have a more full featured program for keeping track of these. if possible i would like to see support for easily turning a proxy on/off. a refresh script would be nice, something that will reload the blog(s) after a user defined timer and possibly alert you to new posts...oh, how about in the list of blogs, the name of the blog could appear green if you've already checked it today and red if you still need to check it. that way you can keep track of which ones you've already seen on a given day. that would really help me i think. let me know if you need an alpha tester, when you make this.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea bro. Its funny only about a week ago I had a very similar idea. Haven't used VB in probably 5-6 years but I thought it would be very useful to have a standalone app for blogging. One thing that would be really useful is if you had a listbox with all the current blogs in it that way you could use ctrl+select to select multiple blogs at a time and open them all at once.
ReplyDeleteI think its a great idea and it saves me from building it, I haven't started yet just had the idea. Let me know when you've built it and post it on your blog, I reckon a lot of people out there would be very interested.