Day: January 29, 2009

More requirements

Some more utterly blue-sky long term goals for the app. Some of them depend entirely on what the phone can do, and I don’t know if it can or not yet.

  • Attach a photo from the library as an icon for the aircraft. Maybe for locations as well, and/or a link to the Maps application. Link people (other crew and passengers) to Contact app, so you can display a picture, and even look up a phone number to call them to go flying!
  • Import from google docs – or a server to do it if the phone can’t. Or maybe direct import from a SQLite database through iTunes? Don’t know – just need a way to get hundreds of records from a previous log book like AvLogBook.
  • Carry forward totals from previous log books.
  • Checkpoint and export – everything before a certain date is exported and deleted, and running totals (ie carry forward) updated.

On browsers, proxies, and JavaScript

My employer forces me to use Windows XP and Internet Explorer on my desktop at work. This is more than just “our internal apps are only supported on IE”, they’ve somehow locked things down. I tried to install Google Chrome, but it complains about a missing DLL when I fire it up. And Safari, which got dragged in when I installed QuickTime, can’t seem to handle our automatic proxy configuration. One of my cow orkers says he has Firefox installed, so I guess I’ll have to try that next.

This came to a head today because yesterday StackOverflow rolled out some awesome new functionality for tracking your reputation, responses to questions and comments. Yesterday it worked great, both at work with IE and at home with Safari. This morning there was a date rollover that Safari had no problems with, but going to any of the new tracking pages in IE crashes the browser. It’s completely consistent – it happens everytime in exactly the same way.

Ok the plus side, they’ve moved the bug reporting and feature requesting site from stackoverflow.uservoice.com to uservoice.stackoverflow.com, which means it isn’t blocked by the web filters at work anymore. Which means I can see that I’m not the only one having this problem.

So now it’s time to do battle with the corporate filters to see of I can get Firefox installed and working.