[pianotech] Piano software for Mac

[John Delacour]

At 09:09 -0500 25/3/09, John Formsma wrote:

>Just thinking out loud ... are there enough Mac/iPhone techs who 
>could join together to hire a programmer to design a program for us? 
>Customized to the way we want? 50 techs x $400 each = $20,000. ÊBut 
>I don't know if that would come close to paying for a project like 
>this. I'd be happy to pay the $400 (or more) for a good program.
>
>Anyone with programming experience to provide an educated guess on 
>the cost of a project like this?

The fact that iCal and Address Book have good scripting dictionaries 
means that a lot could be done with Apple Events and Perl that would 
be easy to customize, and you could have a control centre either 
(text-based) in Terminal or an HTML browser interface.  Mail's 
scripting dictionary is, certainly up to 10.4.11, quite monstrously 
useless, which is why I continue to use Eudora, which is properly 
scriptable, but some things are possible with Mail.

Address Book is fine as a customer database.  Not only have you the 
notes field but you can add as many special date fields as you like 
and can set up the template to create these fields (e.g "Next 
Tuning") in new cards.  Address Book is also merely an interface to 
records kept in the universal standard .vcf (visiting card format). 
I personally have never found the need for such things as Filemaker, 
which is all things to all men, very clumsy, and far too general in 
its scope.

Give me a few examples of things you would like to be able to do and 
I will try to give you various ways they could be achieved.  The 
possibilities are endless.  Every Mac user has Apple Events, 
AppleScript and Perl, but very few people are aware of them or know 
their potential.  I have been AppleScripting on the Mac since 
AppleScript first appeared goodness knows how long ago and am still 
pretty much up to speed with it, though I use Perl, either alone or 
in combination with Apple Events, for most of the things I do 
nowadays.

For example, suppose you keep your customer record in an Address Book 
group, or several groups, and have the field "Next Tuning" filled in 
for each customer, you could run a script to send you a list by email 
of all the tunings you have coming up in the next ten days or so, 
transfer the appointments automatically to iCal, set reminders etc. 
etc.

Without knowing precisely what you want to do, it is pointless going 
into it further.  A programmer needs to have precise requirements 
from his client.

JD