One goal I have for the "30 Days of .NET" series is that I write each application on the day I publish it. That really doesn't leave me any room to spare. I'm not sure I can do it, but that's part of the fun and challenge. I do have a life. And between family, friends, career, hobbies, and dreams, there isn't as much time in day as I would like sometimes. One thing that would be useful for me is to know how much time left I have in day to complete that day's application.
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science.“
- Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)
Minutes to Midnight
Simple, simple application, but I would say it is useful. At first I just had it say 2 hours, 45 minutes, and 38 seconds remaining. But I decided that was too simple. I decided to use progress bars, because it adds a visual element that gives the application a little, let's call it, "weight".
Then I looked at the application and felt it looked a little sterile, aka dull, dull, dull. I decided the answer was to add some color. I did this by going to http://www.colourlovers.com/ and browsing their color palettes. I was even able to search color palettes by using the color of the progress bar, which I got by doing a screen capture and getting the hex color from Paint .NET.
I didn't take me long to notice I had an issue. From my point of view, it's subjective, the progress bar wasn't right. progressBarHours.Value = timeSpan.Hours; needed to be progressBarHours.Value = 24 - timeSpan.Hours;. Once I did this it was working like I wanted it to.
I wasn't thrilled with the top progress bar. It was meant to show the total remaining time left in the day, but I didn't have room for another label. But there is a saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." I think of this as, if you follow the road to Perfect forever, you may never get to Good. If Another reason to use the color scheme to help break the form into logical sections: yes, there is method to my madness, well, at least sometimes.
The only other thing I had to handle was total minutes left. Depending on the math, it would sometimes display "X.666666666 of 1440 total minutes left". Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this, custom numeric format strings: timeSpan.TotalMinutes.ToString("#.0").
Download Executable: minutes2Midnight.cab
Download Source Code: minuates2Midnight.zip
[Be sure to check out the C++ Edition of 30 Days of Windows Mobile Applications]
Feedback
Ok guys, I really need everyone's help here. I need some ideas for applications to write for the next 29 days. I have some, but I could use more. Also I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we make this series even better. I always open to ideas, and suggestions so please feel free to let me know what you think, because if I think it is a good idea I will do it.