Quiky

It has been a busy (and successful) month. First, I spent 2 fabulous weeks in Eastern and Southern Asia, exploring crown jewels of that area.

Right after that I attended Microsoft conference "MS Fest", where I've been introduced to MonoGame - an open source implementation of Microsoft XNA platform for easier game development. Because I have few games in mind for many years (and crashed'n'burned many times trying to make them come to life), I immediately tried to create the most ingenious of them. Thanks to wonderful YouTube tutorials from Coding Made Easy it was even easier.

I used Evernote to track all my ideas, but the lag between mobile and desktop sync was kind of frustrating. I had to deal with conflicts all the time and I got an idea to try (again) to make offline wiki editor for desktop. It supposed to be a tool for quick wiki editing, so I decided to call it "Quiky" (quick + wiki). To my surprise, quiky.net domain was available, so I took it.

For QetriX I created nice wiki parser in PHP in the past and it wasn't hard to convert the code into C#. I really love this language and .NET platform, I have to say.

Quiky for Windows

After about 12 hrs the core stuff was done and I really like what I did. I made few design flaws here and there, but it wasn't hard to get rid of them. Application can work with multiple wikis, represented by a directory. Each page has it's name as filename and it's contents in the text file. When saved, a HTML file is generated thanks to my parser, and displayed in WebBrowser component.

OK, that's the desktop part. What about a mobile app? Because I have an iPhone and I don't want to jailbreak it, it was a no-go for me. Therefore I decided to try HTML5 with localStorage for offline situations.

I started slow and low, but quickly expanded into much more complex script. My main target was low data footprint for network transfers and I like to deal with such stuff (optimizations for speed and resources).

My goal was to create a web version of that desktop app, plus extend functionalities of the app to communicate with the web app. Web app will be able to merge changes line-by-line (I already have a working solution in my drawer, it was one of my little challenges :)

It will need few more hours and hours of testing, but I can feel I'm on right track there. I'm still thinking how to tie it into QetriX and the same applies for the game. I want it all to be into single environment.

Oh and the game went south a little bit :) I decided to stay low and make something simple at first, than to add more stuff and make the desired game. Until then, do you remember Tunneler and Atomic Bomberman? ;-)