Loose Ends

Now that the primary pieces of SkyTools 3 are in place, the next phase is to tie up all the loose ends. These loose ends range from projects I got sick of working on and never finished to small suggestions from users that I promised to incorporate. This is a huge milestone for me because I no longer have to face down large daunting tasks with major problems that must be solved with little idea of how long they will take to finish. From here on out it's all downhill, and a lot more fun.

I spent some time this morning making a giant todo list. I poured over my notes, including in the list unfinished projects, minor ideas I have yet to implement, and user suggestions I committed to incorporating. The final list has 71 items. That may seem a little daunting, but it isn't really. There are only four or five items that amount to more than a days work. The vast majority can be accomplished in lest than an hour. Some will only take a few minutes. Of course, history says at that at least one will unexpectedly take a week... (or two)

The best part of all this is psychological. It can sometimes be difficult to get up to speed on a big project, and when it gets mired down in unsolved problems, already a week behind schedule, it can be hard to keep up the momentum. But a todo list is great! Even on the most beautiful spring day when all I can think about is sitting in the sun reading a good book, I can easily get myself up for doing the first little thing on the list. And the next. And the next. At the end of the day it feels great to know that I finished 12 items!

Probably the biggest remaining item is my new Observing List Wizard. Ok, I call it that, but technically it isn't a Wizard, so I really should stop. But it seems so boring to call it the Observing List Generator, or some such. How about the Observing List Suggester? Yuck. Sometimes I wish I had someone to help who's only job was to come up with great names for things.

Anyhow, I wanted to have a more simple method of creating observing lists than the Database Power Search. Now that SkyTools can take a telescope, location, and observer and rate how difficult it is to detect an object, I thought it would be great to have a tool that could generate a list of objects for beginners, or a list of observing challenges, etc. The primary idea being a very simple and general set of inputs which would create a randomized list of 'n' objects that meet the criteria.

Another one will be finishing the preview pane I added to the chart preferences dialog. The idea here is to give you a preview of how the element whose color or font or line style you are changing will look on the chart.

Then there's adding the new detectability criterion (obvious, easy, ... challenging) to the filters on the events and ephemerides tabs.

The planetary nebula database should be updated with better magnitudes and some new data.

The open clusters need to have more accurate positions. I'll first get them from SIMBAD then redo any that are still off by hand. Good thing there aren't millions of them!

Then there are little things. Like my new Thumbnail Viewer. This viewer displays more than one chart arranged as thumbnails. You can customize it as you want and it will display either Atlas or eyepiece charts. I finished the thing 6 months ago, but never got around to wiring it into the program.. At the very least it should be great for displaying the objects in an observing list. And maybe even for lists of events. Regardless, all I need to do is place a line of code at the right spots.

There are other little things like making the cursor ignore objects on the charts when the shift key is depressed. I mean, how long could that take? Two minutes?

Once I get most of these things done I'll bring it all together and see if I can get it on a CD (or two DVDs for the imaging version) and I'll start putting together a beta test group. I really look forward to working with the volunteers!