Re: TLF, open source contest logging SW, and contest logging SW future

[Alan Dove]

Hey, folks:

I agree that the current state of logging software - on all platforms -
is pretty stale. This business of having bespoke platform-restricted
programs, each with its own peculiar ways of doing things, feels very
dated now. The plethora of ham logging applications in development
suggests a lot of other people feel the same. Unfortunately, almost all
of them are one-person efforts that seem to get off to a strong start,
then languish.

Rather than having individual developers dive right into coding more
soon-to-be-abandoned loggers from scratch, I think what needs to happen
is for a group of code-literate hams to come together and decide on a
general approach, then pursue it together. I've been thinking about two
potential strategies, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses. 

Because I've been learning game coding recently, I've thought about
building a logger in Godot, the open source game engine (
https://godotengine.org/ ). As a game engine, Godot has a slew of
built-in functions for displaying information, and this could produce a
logger that looks really cool and is fun to use. Cross-platform
compilation is built into the engine, so releasing packages for
Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and web should all be feasible. The
main drawback to this approach is that I suspect the number of hams who
are also into Godot is pretty small, so the developer pool might be
kind of restricted. That said, Godot is not that hard to learn, and its
internal scripting language is very much like Python.

The other strategy would be to build a logger in some Javascript-based
web-like framework, either with Electron or as a progressive web app (
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps ).
Everybody and their mother has some relevant coding skills in the
underlying languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript), so there's a huge
potential developer pool, and these sorts of applications are
inherently cross-platform. I think the biggest challenges would
probably be things like rig interfacing and possibly performance issues
with logs containing huge numbers of QSOs.

Until such a project gets underway, I think we'll just keep muddling
through with the current mix of applications.

-- 
          --Alan (AB1XW)