PICK

[LLPaul]

You can file this one under, "My brother made me do it!" Well, sort of. When I moved to Maine, Jamie was in the progress of cataloging all his stuff so he had a record for insurance purposes. Since I kept track of all my CDs, DVDs, and books already I figured having a list of everything else would be a good thing. Once the initial pain of setup was done, upkeeping would be easy, in theory. So my list began, and I entered it into a spreadsheet. This immediately became annoying so I searched for a program to keep track of everything and had no luck. Some seemed like they might have worked but cost too much. I was looking for a new tool to write so I could learn C#, Lost Luggage Studios' programming language of choice. Thus began PICK.

PICK? Personal Inventory Control Kit. Its purpose is to keep track of all your stuff in one place. I have the program configured as a treeview on the left side and a data page on the right; to track the name, serial number, model number, and various other bits of information. The saving/loading feature uses XML and I have put in an import/export feature for CSV. So if you already have something in a spreadsheet you should be able to bring it right in, with some minor tweaking perhaps.

I'll post some screenshots soon. There remains some work to be done on documentation as well as some serious testing.

Current Status: Alpha Testing
Estimated Release Date: mid June
Estimated Cost: Beerware!

[LLPaul]

PICK is getting ready to enter beta. We're shooting for a September release, if all is well. I've added some features to it as well as making sure it works in Linux, my OS of choice. I've posted a screenshot on our Facebook page. A link to our Facebook page is on our home page.

There is a known Mono bug for Linux users. If you have a space before any text and try to use Ctrl-(left arrow) to scroll to the far left of your line the program will crash. The crash is graceful though, and you will be prompted to save your file before it crashes. Make sure you click on Yes. This does not occur in Windows, so hopefully when/if Mono (v2.4) is ever updated the problem will be resolved. Other than that, I've had to code some OS checks to get some things to work right, but I'm pleased with the results.

We have yet to try it on the Mac. If you have a Mac and want to help us test, post in the forums and let us know. We could always use some beta testers. The more the merrier.