I’ve been doing gobs of work lately on Academia, and I’ve gotten to a small little milestone I’ve set for myself as “Part I,” and that’s the create portion of the application. Well, creating a new student and associating courses with it. Which was a huge source of confusion in my brain, originally. Read on for a few other missteps I had while doing it (sorry, no screenshots yet, maybe later).

My first dilemma was getting the user to input their courses. How was I going to go about implementing that? My initial idea was to have the user just type in the name of the class and the grade they got. I then realized that if this became an actual application on the market (free or commercial), that wouldn’t cut it. Well, a lot of the stuff I’m doing probably wouldn’t cut it, anyway — but I wasn’t okay with that method of user input. So I went with combo boxes. All combo boxes. Except the name of the course, which gets pulled from the database and stuck on the form as a simple text label.

My second dilemma actually got solved before the first one did, and that’s which classes to include in my database (or rather how to get them there in the first place). I wanted to keep things simple (something I usually have problems doing), so I went with Missouri State’s class schedule to get course codes and short descriptions. I figured it wouldn’t be much of a problem to use the whole course catalog, so I began to copy. I would’ve gotten though the whole catalog in 20 minutes, but I stopped halfway through and realized something. I’ve got to put in credit hour amounts for each one of these classes, and I’m already at 2,000 classes. So I backtracked and only selected a set of departments (business ones like Marketing, Accounting, Management, CIS); I have close to 300 classes in my database, and I think that’ll do fine for what I’m trying to do. I may update the classes with better class names (right now they’re abbreviated names that look pretty crappy on a form) but I’ll save that for once I’ve got everything else done.

Meanwhile, I’m throwing together songs while I’m slinging code that really get me pumped. Call me nerdy, but they’re great motivators for me. And no, there’s no Barry Manilow. I’ll probably post the mix once I’m finished with Academia.

On my to-do list? Create an application icon, for one. I’d like to get that out of the way before I move on to Part II, or the update form. It’s another great motivator, because I like design more than I like coding. I’ll certainly post the icon on here once it’s done.

I’m tired, so I’m calling it a night.