The Past
This page reflects upon the original reason the program was created and provides an overview of the previous versions.
Original Motivation
In the days predating 2006, Cornell Pep Band managers kept track of priority points by entering attendance lists into spreadsheets. The time spent entering the names of members, along with the hassle of keeping these spreadsheets organized, made this an unpopular chore. Sign up sheets would also need to be entered into spreadsheets after they came down, and multiple files would need to be referenced to make cuts. This system clearly lacked efficiency and constituted the majority of the drudgery of being a Pep Band manager.
History
By Eric Heumann '08
During his tenure as Pep Band manager, my roommate Jason Endriss '08 would occasionally vocally express his displeasure at having to enter fifty names into Excel, twice, every week. After such an occasion, I confronted him about this issue and came up with an idea to write a little program to make the process less painful. My third roommate, Matt Caulfield '08, had just finished writing RankWriter, a piece of software to create drill for the Marching Band, earlier that summer, and I thought it would be fitting to have a piece of software contributed to the Pep Band as well.
Version 1.1, Version 1.2, and Version 1.5
The original program simply provided an interface for rapidly entering names into a CSV (comma separated value) spreadsheet. It would consult a primary roster spreadsheet to load a list of names, and would then auto-complete the names as the manager entered them into spreadsheets for sign up lists or attendance sheets. This original program was later enhanced to provide a feature for updating the roster's point tally using an event spreadsheet and a point value for that event, as well as a feature for exporting the roster's point tally as a PDF so it could be emailed to the band as a "points update". Jason and Erik Hugel '09 both successfully managed the Pep Band's priority points using this version of the software.
Version 2.0 and Version 2.0.4
The primary flaw of version 1 was the clutter of CSV files that required manual organizing on the manager's computer. This required the manager to come up with a naming convention for the files and a folder hierarchy. Furthermore, the point tally was kept in the roster file as a written value. If the manager forgot to update the tally or entered the wrong point value, this tally could easily become inaccurate. The primary goal of version 2 was to eliminate these flaws by storing everything in one large XML file. In this format, a points tally would never be written as a value. Instead, it is calculated for any member by adding up the point values of all the events the member attended.
This project was completed in early 2009, just in time for the new management of Miranda Reid. Unfortunately a major bug in the software ended up ruining the XML file shortly after she started using it, so points were tallied the old way until they reset after hockey ended. This bug was patched successfully, and version 2 has now been running stable for more than half a year as of November 2009.
New Version
At least one major "request for feature" has been submitted by Miranda since version 2's debut. Due to its rapid development, however, version 2 has some ugly insides, and it is very much not improvement-friendly. Therefore, to bring the program up to the current standards of Java desktop application programming, to establish a clean architecture that will provide the ability to easily add features and improvements, and to expand the program's capabilities beyond that of the current version, we've decided to start over fresh.
The first step to the actualization of this mission was to establish a truly free and open source project. The BSD free software license legally maintains that this software is free, and the hosting of the project here on Project Kenai offers the means to adopt an open source development process.
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