Well, I significantly overestimated what my bandwidth would be this week before spring break. I spent a lot of time working on our design report, and given that my spring break travel started on Thursday, I didn’t end up having time for much else.
MVC vs MVVM
One thing that I did more research into this week was the model for our software architecture. Originally, I had conceived of our backend as MVC (Model View Controller) architecture due to my familiarity with this paradigm from my experience developing web applications. However, looking into it a bit more, it turns out that the standard for desktop applications is MVVM (Model View Viewmodel).
Basically, MVVM introduces complete separation of concerns between the GUI (View) and the database and program logic (Model) with the Viewmodel acting as a mediator. This will make it easy for us to develop these elements in separation. Plus, it’s a reactive architecture: the Viewmodel automatically responds to changes in the Model, and likewise, the View responds to changes in the Viewmodel, which will be useful for real-time updating, like the animation of the cursor that scrolls over the music. MVC is a similar paradigm, but less strictly enforced, and more suitable to web development. Of course, for either paradigm, it’s up to us how strict we’re going to be, and there’s always options to customize. Tentatively, I think this will be a helpful general framework for us to follow.
Last Week’s Goals Revisited
- Write my parts for the Design Review report – COMPLETE
- Research & make a decision about DearPyGUI (ASAP) – COMPLETE
- Given the sorts of data analytics we will need in the application, and our desire for a flexible and engaging user interface, we decided that DPG is our best option for
- Better documentation for code – IN PROGRESS
- started README file, but haven’t tested it on other devices
- Record Screen File Saving – NOT STARTED
- (Optional) Playback Screen Upgrades – NOT STARTED
Goals For Next Week
- Better documentation for code
- Finish README file for setting up dependencies on different OS
- Re-implement basic menu, record screen, and playback in DearPyGui
- Record Screen
- User can choose to either save/discard a recording instead of auto-saving
- User can customize naming a recording upon saving
- (Optional) Playback Screen
- Add cursor that moves while playing
- Let user drag cursor to various points in the playback
- Add separation of signal into rows + scrolling