On the weekend I moved the iMac to the kitchen in an attempt to get some more use out of the big girl, part of which is hopefully resurrecting my much neglected blogs.

This is a test post from the new VM I setup just to run live writer on for blogging… lets see how it goes.

Pete.

The new racer dirchie still needs some tweaking (If you’ve got any suggestions drop them in the comments), all the other characters just flowed easily once I got the concept down but he’s proving to be a challenge to get right. Otherwise this is the redesigned cast of what I’m officially calling Dirchie Kart 2.

This year’s dream build play was announced last week, the timing is a little tight but I think it’ll be a fitting finish to the project. At the very least it gives me a deadline to be finished by, at best it’ll give me a shot at taking it to the next level… Xbox Live Arcade… go big or go home I say!

Some days I think I don’t have a bad handle on this WPF stuff, this weeks new route planning UI is some of my finest work yet. I can’t take all the credit though, Microsoft have done a stellar job with the Bing maps WPF control.

In the image below the days across the top of the map are actually a ListBox, the selected day brings forward and expands the order pins and lists the available trucks for that day. You simply drag the order from the map screen to the truck on the side to plot a route, you can even drag order items between trucks to re-route them.

I’ve still got a fair bit of detail to add and some more database fields to store the data, but most of technical hurdles have been overcome at this point. I’ll blog about a couple of tricky points I’ve hit soon.

The captain took a bit of work, I found I kept gravitating toward a Popeye styled skinny sailor, in the end I went to the complete opposite.

This week I thought I was going to be implementing this new order entry system I’ve been writing, but as I started entering test data I realised it wouldn’t work unless I implemented the second part of the project, a production planning/scheduling app.

I’m pretty chuffed with how it’s coming together, what you see in the screen shot is the result of 2 pretty solid days work. There’s a bit of nice drag’n drop trickery going on there it’s mostly MVVM styled with a few exceptions where it makes it easy, but for the most part the code is pretty neat.

I’m off for a long weekend now, next week I’ve got to add truck load grouping to it… which will be interesting!

I had a brain fart about 3 weeks ago of flexible system for sending different levels of notification from both the a database query or directly from code. Today I embedded the web view of the lowest level of notification directly into my administrative app at work complete with an iOSesk counter (the red dot at the top).

The little blue dots clear out the individual line items with a nice AJAX slideup, which also works on the iPad formatted 2 column view and the iPhone/Andriod compatible single column view.

Those “link” hyperlinks on that view also take you directly to the management interface for that specific object be it a delivery or a sales order, obviously those don’t work in the mobile devices so I hide them away with some CSS.

The underlying rendering and  transmission service can generate SMS messages and Emails from the same source data also.

I’m pretty chuffed with how it all came together, I think we’ll get a lot of use out of this one!

I still need to come up with a better name than Joe, he’s gone punk in defiance of his robotic precision.

BrownBot gave me the opportunity to take the new style to the nth degree, stripping back all detail to just a silhouette. I’ve also fitted all the character redesigns with this textured poster frame, they’re starting to come together.

Peaches still needs some simplifying but she’s off to a good start.

I’ve finally managed to get find the Dirchie Kart binaries a new home. My old file host suspended me for too many downloads after I got some exposure on indiegames.com, apparently 20gig in a week is too much!

Anyhow now the binaries and some additional information will be posted over at http://www.indiedb.com/games/dirchie-kart-2.

I’m just ramping back up the development after moving back to Australia, so send in all the feedback you can?