The basis

What's first in every project is to specify its basis. The first days that I worked on this project, following the guidelines of one of my supervisors (Mike Bennett), I pined down the interface of the application, its uses, its future possibilities and modularity. Once a new project is started its really important to have clear what is the objective and how to achieve it. The initial idea was to base the project on Superkaramba (Plasma), the software that manages the desktop gadgets/widgets of KDE in Linux, building it as a plugin. It would use Python for the main program and XML to store the data. As one of the objectives is to get to the most people possible by creating a multiplatform software, the idea of Superkaramba was dismissed. The second idea was to use SDL, as the graphics is one of the strenghts in this project, and clearly SDL brings a lot of graphic power. After two days of hard work we get to the conclusion that SDL was not the right choice as it is excesively complicated, which is against another of the principles: Keep it simple. It really didn't give what we really want for this project. After a lot of tests, we get to the Qt Toolkit, from Trolltech. This is a demo of its possibilities: