From: Laurent Sansonetti <lrz@...>
Date: 2004-04-14T04:21:05+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Alexandria 0.1.1

On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 18:41, Hal Fulton wrote:
> Laurent Sansonetti wrote:
> > Alexandria is a GNOME application to help you manage your book
> > collection.
> 
> Wow, that is so cool. That saves me from having to write my own
> app like that. :)  Seriously, it was on my to-do list.

Thank you, I'm glad you like it.

> > * features an HIG-compliant user interface ;
> 
> Sorry, what's HIG compliance?
> 

HIG stands for "Human Interface Guidelines":
  
  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

> If you're taking feature requests, I'd like to see various
> reports available (prefer HTML).
> 

We plan to add the possibility to import/export data for the next
release, through the GNOME-DB framework (which can reach a lot of data
sources, and not only databases).  GNOME-DB also features generation of
reports from the data, so maybe it can be useful for us in this case,
otherwise we can still write our own reports generator :)

> I assume there's some way to categorize these, by hand if not
> automatically?
> 

Categories are planned.  In fact we plan to implement a kind of tagging
system.

> Would also like a field to record that a book is borrowed, and
> who borrowed it.
> 

This is planned, as well as the possibility to rate books.

> And a crazy idea I had was to record the approximate heights and
> thicknesses of the books (I actually have this recorded on paper).
> That way I can theoretically pack them on shelves in a logical,
> semi-automated way. (I understand if you don't like this idea.)
> 

AFAIK Amazon doesn't provide this kind of data in their queries, so you
will need to enter them by yourself in Alexandria, unless we find
another "data provider" than Amazon (I'm currently looking for
alternatives) which supports them.

> For a pic of (most of) my books, here's a pic of David Alan Black
> at the codefest at my house in 2002: http://rubyhacker.com/p8190001.jpg
> :)

Waw :-)

--
Laurent