I know it's technically a "work night", but I just went through my drawer trying to dig out my ancient mockups for a project I've recently revived.
I had originally built it as a thing for Dad to use for outreach activities - Back in the day (i.e. back in 2009, from the comments in the source code I've been porting between machines), I'd managed to get the core engine running, but ultimately ran out of time (+ also, a suitable distribution tech stack back in the day), so had ultimately abandoned that project.
Anyway, recently I've been resurrecting it as a motivating toy app to play with Haxe + HaxeUI.
* This seemed like the perfect project for learning this stack + playing around with it. It was a relatively simple + straightforward little piece of tech that is small enough to be easily implementable / portable (i.e. within constraints of what I can safely manage energy-wise + time-wise on top of long days of fulltime 9-5 weekday job commitments).
* It was also an almost perfect case for this tech stack (i.e. the HTML5 deployment option is particularly attractive for someone who has never been able to get CSS layouts + Javascript coding to really sit well with my worldview).
In other words, this was the PERFECT type of small toy project to tinker around with during the evenings now, as I try to re-establish a small pipeline for me to get a bunch of small fun projects done for myself, where I have full + complete control over every aspect. No questions asked. No input from third parties accepted or needed. 100% owned by me, and for the sole purpose of me having a creative outlet to do fun stuff for myself.
Anyway, after finishing porting all the old simulation engine from C (with the original code-base having actually been in Python IIRC), it got time to start worrying about what the UI for the thing should look like.
And that's how we get to tonight's side-quest: Locating my old mockups, which I vaguely remember I'd envisaged as having a glossy "Thick Textbook"-style diagram of the process being simulated (i.e. it would've had a light sky-blue "burst" background behind graphics of what the process looked like.
For some reason, I got the feeling that I'd recently seen them inside the front cover of one of the folders I kept old stuff in - notably on a lined pad that I'd drawn the latest mockup on. Surely it must be there!
Well... turns out after pulling the suspected folder out (having had to drag everything *else* out to uncover it), only to then discover that it wasn't there after all, but *hidden* and inside another folder that was instead always easily accessible!
Turns out, they were not quite what I had remembered them being - certain elements were there for sure, while others were not what I thought I remembered trying to do. Also, it quickly became obvious to me why I never really went ahead with those mockups - i.e. they were somewhat unbalanced in quite a few ways, meaning that they were not as nice / ready to use, and were in fact in need of a few more rounds of trying to come up with a better design. Ah... seems we're back to square 1, just without the worry of trying to reproduce what came before anymore
Anyway, what I originally wanted to say was:
In the process of locating that, I came across all my old scribbles and jottings about various project / design ideas, pages and pages of sketches, various todo lists from big projects I worked on, and finally, pages and pages of notes from various "cinematic dreams" I'd had (and would then quickly wake up to jot down the details of before they faded from memory)
And looking through all that, my thoughts were:
* 1) Gee... I've been a pretty prolific bugger!
* 2) Wow... I used to be a lot better at drawing than I am now! (Then again, it's been like a good 3-4 years since I'd drawn a lot, having really eased off doing it since the pandemic)
* 3) I was reminded that I've been wanting to tackle that music-notepad / music composition environment app problem for *years*, with multiple generations of ideas and sketches on how I might tackle it.
* 4) My full list of personal projects is indeed a lot longer + colourful than what I remember these days
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