For those of you who had no clue, my development laptop was in the "shop" for the past three months.  Let's just say it takes a while to fix a laptop that the repair crew broke...  Now that I have the computer back, I get to continue ConTrak development.

This post concerns libraries and UI changes since last time.  This will tell you where I am heading with development.

Scriptaculous - This JavaScript library controls all animation effects in ConTrak as well as drag and drop.

Rico - Rico was used only to round divs.  I will now use its accordion capability, a major UI change I will cover later.

AJAX .Net - Though minimizing its use for all departmental pages, this AJAX component will handle all custom AJAX needs.  As I have to write some extensive JavaScript (read: time consuming), I plan to minimize this library's use.

Anthem .Net - Another AJAX library that, at this time, I am considering bringing on board.  Its development is open source and continual, but I think it's far enough along I can use it for what I need in ConTrak.  This library will be used EXTENSIVELY and will form the core of ConTrak's AJAX use from here on out.  This is a key component.

Rich DDL Menu - My custom rich drop down list will handle the overall convention/departmental navigation while the Rico accordion will handle inter-department navigation.  Hence, I will only have two rich ddls at the top instead of the three that was in my design.

Major UI Change

Navigation - I can lump most of the changes under this heading.  You will use the Rich DDLs at the top of the screen to choose your convention and department.  From there, the department home page will be displayed.  An accordion control like that seen in MS Outlook will be on the left.  It will contain everything you need for that department--usual operations, tools, reports, administration--everything.  I took a while deciding this and more than three or four hours making a test version of the proposed navigation change.  It looks and, more importantly, fits better than what I had before.

First Department Rollout - Registration will be the first department to be rolled out.  After that, the gaming room, art show, and charity auction.  These four departments will compose the first release of ConTrak Systems v2.0.  Only mission critical features will be added to the first release.  These features will be chosen via a very simple question: "Did we use that last year?"  If we didn't, don't count on getting the features until a later release.

Scheduled Launch Date - ConTrak Systems v2.0 is scheduled to be released in early February 2007.  We may decide to launch a preview version (CTP) earlier, but this is still up in the air.  My schedule has become rather full.

Rumors of ConTrak Mobile - That's about all they are at the moment and nothing will be in development until at least June 2007.  ConTrak Mobile will allow PDA users to connect to ConTrak Systems.  I anticipate there will be quite a demand for such a feature as time goes on.  Of course, the AJAX-based, JavaScript-heavy ConTrak Systems v2.0 will not be accessible via PDAs due to it using new technologies.  ConTrak Mobile will be designed specifically for PDAs and should provide a better UI than the PDA's OS itself.  We're working hard to push the standards of what you expect for ConTrak Systems.  Just wait for it and you'll see it was worth it.

As always, I'm "Rising to the Challenge" at PhoenixPo.com.  Now if I can only get some time to redesign this main web site.  Yeah, right...