On Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 07:57:26AM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> Well, the list of fields I want is quite big. None of the Windows
Good, these are the kinds of ideas I was looking for...
> programs has all of them, which is part of the reason I'm considering
> home brew.
>
> Things commonly lacking in existing log programs
> * no separate name and QTH fields (some programs expect you to put these
> in the comments; I prefer separate fields)
Obviously they should be separate; in Nettebook there are two name
fields, lastname and othernames. Othernames is firstname plus whatever
else... that way it works better internationally in case people have
more than one middle name or something, and yet you can still sort
or search by last name.
What form would you like to use for QTH? lat/lon, just the city
and country, grid square, ??? I would think it would be best to allow
any or all of these but not to require them.
> * mode field of 3 or 4 characters with a fixed list (I mostly operate
> Hellschreiber which has a lot of sub-modes like "PSKHELL245" and
> "FELDHELL", just as SSTV has "Martin M1", "Robot 36" etc,
> and I would like to log the exact mode used).
Typically in this kind of situation I would provide a drop-down list
on the form with all the known choices so far, and the last choice
is "other", and there is an adjacent text field to type in a new one.
After that it becomes one of the choices so you never have to type it
again.
>
> I also like to log the transmit power used both by my station and
> the remote station. (This is getting into the very picky category.)
> One program I do like for Windows has a field for my transmit power,
> but not the other op's.
Cool. And maybe the type of radio, antenna, elevation, tower height,
direction the antenna is pointed if it's directional, ... or is a
plain comment field enough for all this?
>
> Contesting? Difficult to build a program that does both contesting
> and casual logging well I think.
Yeah. If you're in a hurry then maybe web forms are not as efficient
as a conventional GUI. But what else is different?
I've heard that some contests require you to submit a log on a special
standard form. Well that's kindof like some mailmerge features I've
already done... if you could write TeX or Postscript code to reproduce
the form, then you could also merge the data from the log with that form
to submit to the contest authority. But the data is different, so the
code wouldn't be quite reusable... just similar. What I mainly use
mailmerge for, is to print an envelope with the address of any person
in my contact database. I hit a link to do that, choose the mailmerge
template, and it prints. I had to learn a little postscript to be able
to figure out how to do it.
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__) | | \________________________________________________________________
Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903
