It's time to put on make-up

[venta]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; sometimes a single image can tell an entire story.

Walking through Woodley this lunchtime, I saw a late-teenage girl. Written on her forehead in purplish letters: MUPPET.

:)

Not at all relevant to that, I have a couple of enquiries if anyone's willing to help.

I've been challenged by one of my rapper team to produce a small application to avoid her head exploding as she tries to work some stuff out. Basically, I need to create an app into which she can enter the names of the team members present, and it'll create a nice little list of who should dance which dance, where, in what order.

So, basically I need to work out a bunch of logic to determine who does what dancing, and put a pretty front end on to it. Now I'm perfectly capable of doing this - sadly, though, I'd write it in the proprietary language peculiar to my company, and I'd have to distribute copies of our OS to anyone who wanted to run it. Which kind of rules that out.

So - if you were required to do such a thing, how would you go about it ? The finished app is to be sent to a person who's computer literate, but no more than that, so shouldn't require them to download lots of stuff in order to be able to run it. I feel that writing a standalone app which someone else could run is something which I ought to be able to do - so look on this as a general query, as well as me wanting a particular problem solved.

In this specific case, given that it might need updating from time to time, as new people join the team or others leave, it might be most sensible to write some kind of Javascript/CGI thing and plonk it on a website somewhere. Suggestions on this would also be appreciated.

(For reference, I'm used to writing in a language which is the bastard offspring of C and assembler. I know a bit of C/C++, and I'm familiar with the basic concept of shell scripts. And that's about it :)

I've just been setting up some more message filters in Outlook, and I've set up a couple of rules that say "when I send a mail to person X, move the message from 'sent items' to Folder Y". What I would like to add is "and don't then mark it as 'unread', you daft bugger". Worse I've just realised that it doesn't move it and mark it unread. It copies it, and marks the copy as unread. So I'm ending up with two copies of each mail I send to X.

Yes, yes, Outlook is awful, yada yada. I have perfectly happy little rules set up in Eudora at home that do exactly the right thing. But Outlook is what I use at work.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The question I've raised (and I don't know the answer to this) is whether such an approach requires anything on the end-user's machine.

Eg. I don't have Access on my machines at home.
I've met VB apps in the past which have required downloading a few meg of libraries first (which M$ may now be including in Windows, rather than being an additional download).
And I have never knowingly met anything in Delphi, so I'm ignorant there.

Of course, the same problems occur (but are more likely) with Perl (my personal preference(*)) or anything else that needs to run on a Windows box: does the user need to install anything before they can run the app?

(*) That's my preference, for my writing stuff. I'm aware that venta doesn't know Perl, so there's no point adding this to the list of possible handicaps.