StoryServer — The World’s Toughest One-Pane Grid — Color Customization, Sorted View and Notepads.

Polywick Studio
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

The developers at Polywick Studio implemented, perhaps, the world’s hardest programming challenge: a one-pane grid, as well as implement features made by in-memory patches to the original organizer via extensions.

The Genius Grid

The developers who made the one-pane grid system, were geniuses. They never told how it worked as they sold the Intellectual Property to NETMANAGE (1).

For nearly 21 years — from 1997 to 2018 — time stood still. There were no worthy one-pane organizers.

A search of all the known development toolkit have shown none had implemented any of the features required to implement an original one-pane organizer.

Paradigm Shift

What happened to GrandView(tm), Lotus Agenda and other legendary great organizers?

GrandView for DOS (Photo-credit: Supplied)

In DOS, you can move left, right, up and down, and free-form render to 24 lines, 80 column character grid.

DOS-Based Multi-Tasking Grid (Photo-Credit: Real-Time Multitasking Kernel for DOS (2))

In the source-code of multi-tasking console-based systems, the predecessor of GUI-based systems, the concept of Window is based on drawing ASCII lines

Extended ASCII Table (Source: Webopedia (3))

In the transition to Windows-Based Systems, the “draw” or “render” is not free to draw where-ever they like.

Instead, render to screen is based on a somewhat confusing API system with multiple subsystems.

Acta for OSX

What was lost in transition, were — the ability to creatively render what is required.

Grid Colors

Besides the world’s hardest grid, are the monstrous menus and pop-up menus and power-features found in the original one-pane organizer.

In the screenshot below, you will see well-thought Format Menu that merges the old and new menus as one-single Format Menu.

Alt+F, Display, Grid Color

Everyone knows the red-line and it’s usually red. In the below screenshot, this will be changed from Red to Blue.

A professional color-picker is provided to the user to select color.

Custom Color Picker

After selecting the color, you can see a blue color left margin line.

Look! Blue color left margin!

Customers can change the background color of the grid.

Background Color Change to Purple!

Data Sorting

StoryServer implements the Sorted View feature. The Sorted View is implemented as a Windowless dialog-box.

Sorted View Windowless Dialog Box

After pressing [OK], the items are now sorted in ascending order.

Sorted View, Ascended Sort — Notice all the items are sorted in ascending order.

Repeating the same operation, and selecting ‘Descending’, sorts the grid in descending order.

Sorted View, Descended Sort — Notice the items are sorted in descending order.

New Notepads

StoryServer implements in the Notepad Menu in a well-thought manner.

Alt+V, Notepad, New Notepad

Selecting the “New Notepad…”, you will see a Windowless dialog. This allows the customer to add new notepads without having to re-select View|Notepad|New Notepad repeatedly.

New Notepad — minimal dialog

Pressing the “C-olor” button allows user to change the tab-color as seen below.

Color Dialog Box

There are noticeable differences:

  1. StoryServer implements the multi-line tabs as a wholly new feature. This is not found in original software nor in-memory extension.
  2. Rename is implemented as Windowless Dialog.
  3. There is move-left and move-right menu-item, as this g̷a̷m̷e̷-̷m̷e̷c̷h̷a̷n̷i̷c̷ feature is implemented as menu-item. (The original software implemented inside a dialog-box).
Multi-line Tab

The message-box prompt is implemented as a Windowless message-box as well. This considerably reduces the amount of mouse-clicks, key-presses to GTD — get things done.

** Note: The above screenshots are Beta screenshots and may change without notice. The functionality contained herein are near-ready screenshots, not prototypes and represents i̷n̷-̷g̷a̷m̷e̷ — in-app user-interface.

References

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro

2) http://www.on-time.com/rtkernel-dos.htm

3) https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/extended_ASCII.html

Polywick Studio

Written by

The development team of Polywick Studio. (For Arts Team — ArtStation.com/PolywickStudio)

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