Developing Dream Journal Software - Suggestions Welcome

WOW! Speech recog. in Java?!?!?! Man, if u can do that, then u far exceed my programming abilities. I would love to have that feature, but I don’t know much about speech recognition. I’ve experimented with it a bit, but don’t you need to personalize it for every person? Maybe not I’m not sure. I would be happy without it too though. …wow… :cool_laugh:

No, I didn’t write it too clearly :tongue: I can’t use speech recognition in Java. But I can in Vb and .net but that’s easy. Microsoft provide an easy to use control to interface with some engines. The ms speech recog engines are useless. I was using SAPI 4.1 I think. It’s probably old now.

Arthur: If somebody hasn’t already said this, I suggest download Alchera’s free trial. You can get a LOT of good idea’s from this. I am not willing to pay money for a dream journal, so the best of luck to you :happy:

a few thing i didn’t like about the looks of the program:

the buttons on the left should be limited to three; home/stats, dream, search

within the stats menu, you see 3 tabs. one general, one with a list of all your dreams, and one tab where info on the selected entry in tab 2 is displayed.

on the dream menu, you have 4 tabs. list, view, make, edit. the 2 first following the same approach as in the stats area. the next 2 are pretty much self explanatatory.

the search menu gives only one tab, with the search engine. however, when you use the search function, it shows a new tab for the results.

that about sums up how i feel the program should look like. and a way to make the program darker would be appreciated. i know i don’t like to watch a white screen for several minutes every morning.

I’ve coded up all the storage classes and have the ability to add custom statistics. I’m currently setting up some pretty sweet search functionality as well. I have yet to put all this through very much testing, that’s not the fun part, but I’ll get to it soon.

Once that’s all working nicely, I still need to figure out a way to recognize all the links inside the text, although I don’t expect that to be too difficult. Then I’ll code up all the export formats, which should be easy. Followed by a GUI to use all this in a nice way, which hopefully will be beta release one. I’ll be sure to post when that’s ready. Since I only work on this in my spare time, that may be a while yet.

Absolutely, I have plans to allow you to export your journal into many formats.

I’ve never done anything with speech recognition, so it’s probabky a little out of my league, at least for the first release. I’ll try to make it easy to add in for future releases though, sounds like it would be a really nice feature.

It would be easy enough to allow the “look and feel” of the program to be customized by the user, allowing for darker interfaces for those who would want them.

I was planning on using serialized objects to persist the dreams, rather than a traditional database, so you may be able to read those in on another machine… However for backup purposes, I was going to write the entire journal to XML, which would be far easier to work with… But I haven’t decided entirely on the format yet.

I like the idea of opening a new tab for different search results.

Sounds like it’s coming along nicely.

yea, sound great so far Arthur. keep up the good work! :cool:

Um… that sounds contradictory to me.

hehe… how so? Serialized objects are the machine’s representation of objects written to disk, entirely dependant on the implementation of the classes (at least if you want to read them back in)… xml is generally human-readable, and thus wouldn’t be affected by changes to the class structure.

The format of the xml really doesn’t matter in relation to the class structure, as long as it remains consistant from version to version.

public class Dream { String title = "a dream"; //this is a class }

<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <dreamjournal>
  <dream>
   <title>a dream</title>
   <text>this is xml</text>
  </dream>
 </dreamjournal>

And don’t worry, that’s not the real dream class.

I would have expected the classes to have a function “Export” which returns a string representation of the object. That’s why it seemed a bit odd.

Ah, I see… I think it’s better to have a separate class do the exporting, using the storage classes, and just retrieving the information from them to generate the output. That makes it a lot easier to export to different formats anyways.

Hoy you coming along with it? Percentage?

It’s slow going, as I’m only working on this in my free time. I don’t want to rush development and end up with useless software either.

I have all the dream/character/sign storage working nicely now. I’ve also set up some very extensive search capabilities. I just recently got the internal links (like to a dream sign in the dream text) working.

Next I’m going to do the export and the backup/restore features. After that, I’m going to write the interface (which will probably be the bulk of the time I spend on this)… I hope to have a beta version ready in about a month, but how soon it actually is ready depends on how much free time I end up with.

I’ll be starting a new topic once the beta version is ready, check back now and then, you won’t miss it.

-Arthur

How’s it coming?

Well, he hasn’t been at the forum since April 22, so he was probably caught up with something else.

Just another idea :smile:.

You could have an export function that exports to bb code format with all the colours and everything.

https://community.ld4all.com/t/writing-in-rainbows/13719

I havn’t read anything that’s been said before this, so I’ll just tell you what I think would be good features

An inducer (from awake to lucid)
An “Export selected to LD4all forum dreamjournal” function :razz:
choosable themes :partying_face:
Smilies!!! :thud:
Freedom from Microsoft!!!
Intuitive interface
love in every line!

Heh, yeah… I ended up getting pretty busy with school towards the end of the semester, and I’ve been trying to set up a small business. Thus, I’ve been stuck at approximately the 50% mark for quite some time.

I’m only taking one class during the spring semester, so I should have some free time to get some more work in on this. With a little luck, I can probably have a beta ready in about a month, maybe less? I seem to remember saying something similar quite a while back though :smile:

I love it, and easily added!

Absolutely, this will run on any OS with a JVM.

As for an inducer… An interesting idea, but I’m not sure what exactly it would be. Probably a sound played after a certain period of time. Could probably be done as a simple extra, but likely not until a later version.

-Arthur

So, hows this going?

Heh, haven’t done much since my last post… It seems like I’m a lot more busy than I think I really am.

I’ll try to put some time in on it in the next few months. But I make no more promises :smile: I’ll post again when I have something that is ready to use.