The Technogeek Pages

The Technogeek Pages

A technogeek is someone who follows the development of technology with a passion. (That is my definition anyway.)

My current passion is the Android operating system, and in particular the phones and tablets still evolving. I bought the first Verizon Droid shortly after it's release. I had already discovered gmail, and discovered that all of my addresses, phone numbers and contact information was automatically synced to my Droid. Wow. I envisioned something like this 30 years ago. Technology had finally caught up with my expectations. Time to learn more about google.

Watching google is like picking a single drop to watch in a waterfall. In order to get a feel for things, you've got to jump right in and go with the flow.

To that end, I have begun with the newly released beta of App Inventor. Now App Inventor is not a rich, fully developed development system, but it provides everything one needs to develop quite sophisticated programs.

I have developed a program called Decision Explorer using App Inventor. Now, I could have chosen any of several development systems, but I am at the time of my life when I can choose to follow what interests me. I have had a long career developing software, from before the integrated circuit arrived on the scene, until I retired in 2004. You can see my resume here.

About Decision Explorer

Decision Explorer was a natural outgrowth of a program called Decision Maker that I created for the Atari 800 in 1981.

Because of the much larger memory of the new devices, I was able to make the data entered by the user persistent. That is once data has been entered to any point of the program, the program can be exited and the data that has been entered has been preserved for the next entry to the program. Once a change has been made at any point in the program, it is immediately saved. The only way to get an empty entry is to create it deliberately, but I see no need in this version of the program to do that.

When the program is started for the first time, all data points and all names are preset to non-null values. If data for any value has been changed, then that data is recovered at the next entry.

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