Thoughts on small project of mine?

[H00G0]

Hello people!

I'm posting here because I'm "working" on something which is more of a leisure project than anything, and I'd like to know what you think about it, if you have any ideas, criticism etc..

I was basically done with having so many gadgets on my desktop (windows 7), I was using sticky notes, a clock, calendar, and I felt it was using too much memory for what it was (since I have a crappy laptop as of now, I try to use things that are as efficient as possible memory-wise).

So I made a program which works with username - password and which can do a few things thanks to commands that you type in which access different menus:
*Add and remove user
*Log on and off with users that are already registered in the program

for each user you can
*reset your password
*display a list of all commands and what they do
*set reminders, similar to sticky notes really, like a few words, a line at most
*set calendar events, with the date (year, month, day) and time, and you can also write a description of the event to go with that
*store personal information such as email account credentials, any type of credentials really, which you can only access for a certain user, having logged on with a password. You can either display all data, search with key word and display one specific one or delete some of course
*set an alarm (at the moment only one at a time) to go off within the next 24h (currently working on having it attached to date and time so that you can have multiple stored at the same time), sort of a reminder

And to make the info above accessible easily, I made a sleep screen, which toggles if you don't enter a command after 30 seconds. This sleep screen shows in real time and in order:
*date and time
*if an alarm is set, it displays the time and description of the alarm
*all reminders if there are any
*next event on calendar, with date, time, description
*and a small ascii art of a cat sleeping

As I said, it's really something I'm doing for fun, si I'd love to hear some suggestions as to what more could be added, or thoughts, criticism or anything really!

Have a good day/evening/night!

Regards,

Hugo.

[Grime]

Hugo I'm not going to lie but that sounds really cool!

I'm curious, how did you implement the sleep screen? Did you use the console itself and activate the console using some windows stuffs? Are you able to make the console run in the background not have to have a console window being displayed? How did you do that?

Anyways it's really cool that you're writing such programs. Maybe next you can go on adding more thingsor make the interface more user friendly.

I also want to do stuff like this myself, and I really think this forum has too less showcasing threads! I've never ever seen anybody tell or showcase about what they have done with C++. So I appreciate such threads because it throws light on other peoples creativity. Ahem solving coding chef problems is fine and all but that doesn't count as 'creativity'.

[H00G0]

I'm curious, how did you implement the sleep screen?

Well this was the most annoying/interesting/mind bogging function to make for this program to be honest.

Did you use the console itself and activate the console using some windows stuffs?

Well I want to use as little things that aren't exclusively C++ as possible. To answer your question, yes I used windows.h for only one thing, I needed key states. So basically you start the program and you're prompted to enter a command, if you don't log in, nothing happens, if you do, then you get asked to enter a command again. However when you're logged in, if you don't enter a command within 30 sec, the sleep screen appears (you can also force the sleep screen with a command if you need).
The way I go about waiting those 30 secs is quite simple, I'm using a bool function which contains a clock within a loop. if the loop goes round for more than 30 secs in this case, the function returns true and the program goes to sleep, if while waiting for the 30 seconds you hit backspace (hence the need for key states from windows.h) the loop breaks and return false and you can type and enter a command.

The sleep screen in itself is the same but it ticks and clears the screen every second to display the time and you have to press and hold escape to break out of the sleep screen (you have to hold because it ticks every second so it might take a second for the program to notice you're pressing escape).

I hope this explanation isn't too messy..

Anyways it's really cool that you're writing such programs. Maybe next you can go on adding more thingsor make the interface more user friendly.

Yes I'm keen on adding more things, but i'm sort of running out of ideas :), thinking of maybe encrypting the passwords but I'd have to study encryption a bit to do that..

I also want to do stuff like this myself, and I really think this forum has too less showcasing threads! I've never ever seen anybody tell or showcase about what they have done with C++. So I appreciate such threads because it throws light on other peoples creativity. Ahem solving coding chef problems is fine and all but that doesn't count as 'creativity'.

You do learn a lot by solving problems and challenges but I think you do learn even more by trying to create something, even though most of the time it's hard. Like trying to code small games or small programs like the one I'm working on, it's no big deal but sometimes things that sound quite easy to make are a pain and you learn a lot just trying to work them out.

[Grime]

What when you're program is inactive i.e it's in the background? No support for that?

[H00G0]

What do you mean inactive?

If you consider the screen where you enter the command the "main" program, its inactive state is the sleep screen. But i'd rather consider the sleep screen to be the main feature since it displays time, alarms, reminders, and upcoming event on calendar.

If it's in the background for instance behind another window, it keeps going as if it were the active window

[Grime]

Sorry I meant to ask whether you're able to run it in the background without having to have a console window on your tasbar..

[H00G0]

Oh, well yes it runs just as fine as when it's on the foreground, the only thing is that you need to be tabbed on the console to enter the commands, other than that it runs continuously, whether you're tabbed in or out :)

[Grime]

Congrats on your 256th post you're now officially a byte.

I meant to ask whether you made it so that you could force the program to run in background so that you could not interact with it with your mouse i.e that the program is not on the taskbar.. Maybe in the system tray.. I asked because I wanted to know how you did that.

But it seems you haven't done that so NEVERMIND and sorry for the confusion lol..

[H00G0]

Congrats on your 256th post you're now officially a byte.

Haha thanks! I'm officially all that my laptop can handle, yaay :D

Oh my bad! No I hadn't thought about that actually, that'd be pretty cool, even though I have no idea how you do that!

Thank you for the idea though I'll surely look into it!