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Interaction Programme for PDA
Thanks to Dean Gahlon, we are now able to
provide a PDA version of the programme schedule.
Dean's programme is specifically intended for use in keeping track of program items at
science fiction conventions, and has the following features:
- It allows users to easily page from one timeslot to the next, or to select a specific timeslot to view.
- Users can also hide program items that they are not interested in, and
highlight items that they are especially interested in (optionally
moving highlighted items to the top of the list).
- The display can take advantage of the hi-res screens available on some units, and will display
program items in a smaller font, if desired.
- Users can select and highlight (or hide) all items that have a particular string in the title or
list of participants.
- Items can be highlighted in color or by underlining, on units that support it.
- There is a menu item to go to the current time.
- If the data for the program is beamed to a different unit, the highlights set by the beaming user will be cleared
in the receiving unit.
- Users can set alarms for program items.
- The first time the program is run, it will default to showing the program items at the current time.
- You can select whether or not to follow the system preferences for time formatting.
- It is possible to beam schedule data from the program.
- You can beam a subset of the flags marking individual items to another Palm, and mark them differently
there. This lets you mark someone else's items, so you can have some idea of where they might be.
- You can show a list of program items matching all items that have a particular string in the title, participant
list, or description.
- You can show the highlighted items for the current day.
- The program makes use of the additional screen features of the Tungsten T3 where available.
- If the program for the convention has track information for the program items, it is possible to
select whether to display program items by track.
- There is an additional button on the screen, to go to the time of the next item that is marked in any way. In
addition, you can select up to five sets of flags, and a button will appear that will move to the time of
the next program item with that set of flags set.
- The screen for going to a selected time allows different days to have different times, rather than having all
days have the same start times.
- If you want to fill the screen all the time, you can set "overview mode" in the preferences, and the app will
display as many program items as will fit on the screen.
- The app supports the right and left buttons on the five-way navigation bar to move forward and back time slots.
The original version of Dean's program was optimized for use at ConJose.
The current version is more flexible, in that the grid for selecting times is based on data in the config file.
Here is the program: Download me (120 KB download).
Here is the data for Interaction (160 KB download). Note: this has
now been updated with programme changes through to 27 July 2005. 
Finally, some notes from Dean:
I wrote this program, rather than using one of the general-purpose database programs out there, for several reasons:
- It allows you to see just the events for one timeslot, and to change which timeslot that is easily.
All the database implementations I could see would allow you to limit which records were being shown,
but changing which timeslot to show was a clumsy process.
- The time-selection screen allows an overview of all the times at the convention.
- I'd had an idea for something like this for years, and I finally decided to do something with it.
© UK 2005 Ltd, 2002-2005. All rights to content reserved to UK 2005 Ltd, unless otherwise indicated.
This page maintained by webmaster@interaction.worldcon.org.uk.
Page last updated 29th July 2005
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