Before we get into my programs progress, I should make mention of a recent IDE change that has occurred. I was originally coding my whole program in IDLE, but at my friends’ suggestions, I have made the switch to Notepad++. Notepad++ offers a lot of useful features that are absent in IDLE, most notably column editing and tabbed browsing. I’m enjoying it immensely so far. Just a note, if you want to allow Notepadd++ to run your code, you need to create a shortcut and link it with the following:
C:\Python34\python.exe -i "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"
A lot of development and progress has occurred this week. For starters, I finally have an up and running version of my program. One of the first things you may notice is the addition of a new “preview” pane. This was necessary as listBoxes don’t allow for word wrap and a large portion of text was being cut off. I also managed to get a menu bar setup with a simple exit command and an “about” section.
I’ll revisit this code in a later blog post and point out some of the more interesting developments that had to be implement to get it running.
After fiddling around with it for a bit, I had a growing suspicion that it’s layout was not as user-friendly as I first imagined. I decided to demo it to my fellow coworkers and ask for some feedback on how to improve its design. They imparted that the program would be better if was more filterable, that is if they could select a bunch of different criteria and have the program display content accordingly. For example, a teacher may want to see all benchmarks that are from the listening strand, standard 1, but are of SPL level 2, 3, and 4. Essentially, they wanted the program to be easier to browse so they didn’t have to click back and forth between things to compare them.
This seemed perfectly logical to me, but I was at a loss for how to implement it using Python alone. Steeve suggested that this might be a job for a database. After looking into databases a bit, I am inclined to agree. Since I won’t be needing to constantly update my database (the benchmarks are pretty much set in stone), SQLite seemed to be the best choice. I plan on delving deeper into SQLite this weekend.
Lastly, as I talked with Steve about the recent developments in my programming, he said something that really made me feel good about all the effort and progress that I’ve made so far:
“[The program] was a great proof of concept. You got some excellent feedback from it, and have a path forward. This is how you learn to code – how to be a developer, rather. You’re given a problem, or you identify one, you analyze it and design a solution, you create a proof of concept, use it as a tool to gather more information about what the users need, and iterate in this fashion until you have a fully functional product.”
I think this was the highest complement I could have been paid for the work I’ve done so far.