First Day

Monday morning, I take a peek at the Developer’s Kit for iPhones and iPads. The more I look, the less I like. Apple is running a closed store where they control everything.

The iPad is really an entertainment toy.  Only a single app runs at a time (huh?), maybe that makes sense for a tiny iPhone.  I can’t really see using an iPad at University for serious work.

I remembered reading about a team of engineers in India who were building an IPad clone that would run Linux. That’s more my speed - a general purpose, open platform that will run anything.

I hunt them down - the company is ‘Notion Ink’. Glorious hardware design.

Serious horsepower. But they have abandoned Linux, and only plan to release under Android. Ok, I read up on iPhone/Android comparisons, interesting. I download the Android developer kit, which uses Java.

I much prefer the Android platform, and I much prefer the Android hardware. OK - I’ll build Agenda-for-Android. It’s still a closed architecture, but much more open than Apple. I download Eclipse (a development platform for Java), and try to remember what Java I knew.

I check SourceForge to see if anyone has written a clone of Agenda. There was a project called Beeswax (http://waxandwane.org/beeswax), but no one has contributed to it since 2008. It’s written in C. I download it, and - it looks like DOS.

Even has the little ‘musical note’ characters. What were they thinking ?!?


Browsed the code - there wasn’t much. The key thing I was looking for was the database structures, but the writer didn’t use a database. He were going to keep everything in XML text files.

The original Agenda used text files - and that was a key limitation. The hardware of the day was too slow to process more than a few hundred records. It's way faster now, but that doesn't make text files a good idea.


There wasn’t much code in the Beeswax project. The main ‘item’ screen was up, but almost nothing else. The author admitted that he hadn’t thought about views or columns. He had built the foundation without a feeling about what the building would look like.

There was a good reason this project had been abandoned.

I have the original disks for Agenda, but they are on 5 1/2 inch floppies- those old flappy envelopes the size of a cup saucer. But I have always kept a Agenda on my Windows machines, running it under DOS.

I don’t use Windows anymore (gave up after the Vista disaster, both my personal computers are loaded with Ubuntu Linux), but I have a netbook that I traveled through South America with running XP.

So I pulled up a backup from the Cheese+Crackers office computers, pulled off Agenda, loaded it onto my tiny netbook, and fired it up. I start to go through the program making notes, and designing a database schema.

What a great little progam Agenda was. And still is.