I love cute small applications that are useful and written in a short time. Not all applications can be developed like this, of course – although the "are useful" should hold true in any cases ;-).
A very good thing about Tcl/Tk is, that some ideas are very rapidly prototyped – ideas are expanded and coded down and realized quickly. That happened e.g. to Tloona. Usually the rough prototype that exists after some hours can be extended to a fully qualified product. That did not happen to Tloona yet, the IDE is in a process of function generalization and refining now, so that it will be easily maintainable. Also, I want to get the threaded Itcl finished before I really continue the work on Tloona. Since this all is done in my spare time it won’t be that fast… in the end there are other things that you can do in your spare time as well ;-).
But lately I got interrested in stock markets again, after a long time. And – visionary that I am – suddenly I was inspired to write a little tool that can track a portfolio of stocks, draw intraday charts for each of them and warns me about certain quotes that are reached. Just a prototype… and refined to a fully qualified application within some hours of bad-weather spare time fun. No wonder, the weather is truly "awesome" at the moment here… it begins to snow in 700m heights – at the end of May!.
A cute little project, in the end. The starkit can be downloaded here, at the bottom of the page (please read the license notice and disclaimer).
The stocky development reminded me on an extension I developed last year: canvasplot is supposed to draw XY bar- and linecharts on a Tk canvas, including the ability to zoom and scroll the zoomed charts. Well I did not develop it completely on my own, but took parts out of an apparently dead project named tkgraph. The extension is finished, at least the hacking part. Now, there must be documentation written – a task that is.. not very exciting ;-). But I will do it, I really should catch up with some things that I started in the past and finish them. For people that are interrested in the not documented version of canvasplot: it is part of stocky and can be obtained by unwrapping the starkit. Running binaries for Windows and Linux are included in Stocky, and the app itself provides an usage example of some quality.
Finishing up just takes time because it is my spare time…
