Need help with a cross-national freeware laptop citizen diary and willing to pay.

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kresten
Posts: 153
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2008 3:01 pm
Location: Copenhagen
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Need help with a cross-national freeware laptop citizen diary and willing to pay.

Post by kresten » Sat Apr 20, 2024 4:09 pm

Need help with a cross-national freeware laptop citizen diary and willing to pay.

I am an (old) Danish researcher in psychology, emeritus from the University of Copenhagen. Since the 70's I have focused on the domestic sphere and the management of information, and in 1997 I took the first steps in developing a laptop citizen-diary, with the help from professional livecoders.
Several versions has since then been tested, evaluated and reworked, and been in continuous daily use by myself through more than a decade.
I am now working towards publication of standalones of a clone of the multistack diary, and I am therefore seeking technical assistance with the fine-tuning of a few of its features. While I have been made aware that re-building the program from scratch to implement more modern code would be practical, it should be noted from the beginning that this is not a process for which I have neither time nor resources. This means that helping entails dealing with old fashioned liberties in the programming of this multi-stack enterprise.


Principles and features of the program:
The founding insight behind the program is that the body-household, the domestic household and the information household are parallel threads of most human's lifeworlds. If the program shall be able to assist in the management of information across these three spheres, it is important that the design of the clone offers the new user the possibility to furnish and inhabit the standalone after personal tastes and preferences.

Let me list the central features:

* The diary automatically creates a new daycard (at which time is userdefined, e.g. 05:00).

* On return a precise timeadress is written after which the user can write text in any left to right language (but not in hebrew, persian, arabic or urdu)

* Supplementing the use of textwriting the user is offered to install and use pictograms. These are all available via the Glyphs-menu, from which the user can choose which of them to copy in to the daycard. (the present clone exemplifies a distribution, where body household is in the narrowest circle, with the domestic household around it, and information household around the first 2 categories.

* The user can be informed on how to use these features in the "Tricks"-menu.

* Buttons and fields (including the pictograms) are explained in english language “tool-tips”.

* The user can also, via the “Tools”-menu, produce and install text-buttons (in any left to right language) with the same options.

* A button "Addresses " opens a stack where the user can collect (and search in) names, addresses, mobile numbers, mail-addresses, institutions et.c.

* A "RETRO" button offers the user to select earlier time addresses for text & pictograms referring back to earlier in the day.

* A button "Calendar" is an option for the user to make use of an updatable calendar for remembering events and/or for being reminded of expectancies when a new daycard is opened.

* A "Parse" button allows the user to search for occurencies of specific words or glyphs in his or her acumulated diary.

* The "GO" menu gives access to:
- Making, storing, editing and printing textdrafts of any length in any left to right language.
- Mindmapping, producing text-buttons (in any left to right language) and connecting them with lines (This is one of the functions which has to be repaired!)
- Go to a specified daycard in the users accumulated diary.
- See the result of parsings (The parsing function also have to be repaired)
- Go to "my cyberspaces", an internet browser connected to one or more pages for the user to assemble links to personally relevant internet-sites in one or more personal cyberspaces.

* Directly below the central window of the daycard there are 5 small fields which can be used to monitor and assemble data for number of cigarettes, number of drinks, number of medicines, length of sleep and time of blood pressure.
*The last about blood pressure relates to a table, which the user can open through a button "Statistics", and input the details of various (bodily) functions.

* The lower part of the daycard offers options for accumulating notes to a wide range of user-labeled subjects like family members, friends, projects, missing groceries, shopping lists or upomings tasks in the household. ("Detailed preferences" lets the user decide which of these shall be visible in the daycard-window.)

If you need any more information to be able to work with the program, you can just let me know.

Who might be motivated to start using this program:

A) Those whose everyday is complicated by old & new disabilities, aging, chronic diseases, acute illnesses etc. The tool could serve such users to remember, document, overview and master their habits and experiences.

B) People, especially elderly, who have a hard time facing and remembering the many obstacles in the IT community and within a digitized society as a whole.

C) People who want to learn more about IT and accumulate experiences in developing either basic or higher levels of digital literacy.

D) People who are very much alone, and people who are easily bored.
They may here be provided with a platform to "talk with themselves" and, through recording of their factual around-the-clock experiences, come to look at their own priorities, habits and everyday lives in slightly new ways.

By opening a 24/7 diary-trail along the everyday life´s journey, where events, habits, challenges, time consumption and general "informationhousehold" is managed, the owner ensures her/himself at least a marginal documentation-power in face of the offers, demands and allurements of an ever accelerating global information society.

My goal, and the issues for which i need help:

The ultimate goal is the testing and launching of freeware standalones for Apple, Windows and Linux to be downloadable (with the necesary fonts) from www.phenomenalog.dk. (presently not updated)
To realize that goal, I need help in the following:

*The process of parsing the appearances of words or glyphs in the text of accumulated daycards needs, if possible, to be re-engineered without accumulating former parsings, while the result of the last parsing should still be displayed in the stack "Parseviewer".

*The mind-mapping function needs to be repaired. There is a handler with that title, and there is a substack with that name, the first card of this: "Instruction" displays complex mindmaps, and a mindmap palette, which when clicked gives the response "The front script for this palette hasn`t been loaded".

*Can the All Days option (diaysum.html) be restructured to include the pictograms in the glyph-fonts instead of - as now: only in the same font as the text?

*When trying to use the print-function from Drafts, the window containing information about the print, is presently placed behind the Draft-window. This needs to be reversed.

*I am uncertain whether the automatic creation of safety backups can be maintained in standalones. If not: this function needs to be removed.

*The calendar stack ("weekly") has a button "else click here to return", which shall be replaced with a button that allows the user to "Save and close", ensuring that added text is not lost.

More generally I need help from someone who is willing to move the program towards the possibility of a launch, without having to re-code it in it’s entirety.

You will find downloadable "Diary.livecode.zip" and "PCGlyffont.zip" in a folder: "Files for Phenomenalog"at "mega.nz". The link to download this is https://mega.nz/folder/Krx3DRBT#dAyij0nirO-9DvQghmOKTg

It is important, that interested downloaders opens the PCGlyffonts and move them to the fonts folder of their laptop before they inspect the diary-clone.

My mail is "kresten.bjerg@psy.ku.dk
and I am ready to answer questions.

P.S.: The cross-national qualities presumes of course that the user has at least a minimal knowledge of english to understand menus, tooltips and the manual.

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