I’m not the most organised of people and if I don’t write things down I forget them. I have a PDA which I find almost essential in my working life but there have been times when I’ve missed the old filofax that I used to use at the start of my programming career.

To many it will probably sound silly but I miss seeing a week laid out in front of me.

I decided that I would try to re-create that experience to use on the laptop that I use for work.

Project goals

• The applications should be intuitive to use. Most of the journal/diary/organiser sort of apps I’ve looked at have a degree of complexity that I don’t want to see. I want to see a week view in front of me that I can select a day from and just edit what’s written on the day… just like a normal diary.
• The interface should be non-intrusive. No toolbars or really obvious buttons. The application should be about using it – like the feeling of using a Filofax/Franklin and a pen.
• Because I might release it and everybody has different tastes, the application should be skinnable. This is largely for me too – I get bored of things looking the same. :)
• The data should be stored as XML for ease of access by other applications (I’m thinking of a web-version using XSL…)

Current Screenshots

Progress

18th February 2009 : The story so far

The application displays a week-to-view style front-end that is skinned to look like my old paper-based organiser. When I move my mouse over each day, the day is highlighted. The buttons are minimalist, hidden in the bottom-right corner of the application.

Double-clicking on a day opens a window that shows the selected date and a basic text editing area to enter the text for the day. Upon closing the window the date’s entry is stored and displayed on the week-view.

All entries are saved to an XML-formatted file when the program closes.

17th October 2009 : Customisation

The application can now be customised according to the user’s taste by changing the skin files. There’s no intuitive editor so far but that will come…