CS190: Requirements Document Super Duper Virtual Planner David M. Yun February 2, 2000 What is this program and why is it useful? The super duper virtual planner is a piece of software that will mimic the written daily planner in electronic form. In an age where technology is taking over our everyday lives, the personal planner in paper form is quickly becoming obsolete. It lacks the extensibility and convenience to truly help the average student keep his or her busy life in order. The goal of this project, then, would be to create a planner that maintains many of the features of the written planner, yet would allow for more convenience in maintaining order. This planner, in a sense will do a lot of the planning for the user instead of merely being an inanimate spectator to the various goings on in our lives. Furthermore, the features should be flexible such that planner can be tailored to the users needs instead of requiring the user to adhere to the limitations of the planner itself. Organization The super duper virtual planner should provide tools that make this interactivity both easy to use and effective. It is going to need numerous databases to store the necessary information, such as dates, appointments, telephone numbers, journal entries, and such. The databases themselves are not necessarily complex, however the structure with which they are constructed and maintained is essential to making a planner that will provide the ease and convenience of a written planner, while taking advantage of the speed and extensibility afforded by an electronic medium. Client and Target Users The target audience for this program is the student/young professional where speed, convenience, and usability are the most important aspects of keeping an organized life. For many of these people, the written planner simply does not have the capability to fulfill all of the various needs that they desire and require in order to truly record what is going on in their lives. Furthermore, with the explosion of technology into mainstream society, the practicality of using a paper planner is growing obsolete. The day where every student is equipped with a hand held computer is not far off in the future, and creating a program that meets the planning needs of these consumers is not only practical, but also essential. Features Here is a partial list of features that could be included in the super duper virtual planner: * the capability to display daily/weekly/monthly calendars simultaneously * the ability to maintain appointments and reminders on a minute by minute basis * The ability to mark certain days or events according to different categories by which the user could later search through or review. * The ability to connect events, people, phone numbers, directions, etc. with each other such that the user could mark these connections and later revisit them through hyperlinks * The ability to enter in events that will occur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis and have those events appear automatically in the planner's construction of new calendars. Such that the user could enter in their mother's birthday, October 22, and automatically "Mother's Birthday" would appear in the entry for October 22 every year. * The capability to write journal entries or notes to self and connect that to a specific time or day * The ability to construct a list of things to do, or agenda for a day or week that the user could print out * The ability for the user to mark the varying degrees of importance of certain things * The ability to connect the planner to the world wide web such that the user could have access to this planner at any networked computer * The ability of the planner to remind the user of important things that he or she must do. For example if the user requires to take medication on a daily basis, the planner would be able to inform the user of this fact by asking him or her if she has taken her medicine yet. Visualization Not every user is the same. This super duper virtual planner will be designed with this in mind. It will allow the user to customize their planner by having on/off options for each feature. The user will also be able to customize the color scheme of the planner as well as choosing the exact manner in which he or she would like to plan their lives. Hourly, daily, monthly or even minute by minute, each of these different ways of organizing lives would be available. The user would also be able to create databases of their own, a Rolodex of sorts, that would store whatever kind of information the user would like. For example, a user could create a recipe database that would store the ingredients and directions for the user's favorite recipes. Then he or she could create a grocery list by entering a specific recipe or conversely, enter in a grocery list and see what dishes he or she could make with those ingredients. As you can see, the possibilities for extensibility are endless and confined only by the user's imagination. Distributability This system should be able to run on a variety of platforms and through interfacing with the web, accessible from anywhere, anytime. The planner should not be confined to the user's local machine, but instead made available to whomever the user would like it to be accessible to with varying degrees of security attached to different areas of the planner. The super duper virtual planner is not only a convenience for the 21st century, but a necessity. Testing As far as testing goes, this program will be tested on potential users to get feedback on its ease of use and usefulness of features. Furthermore, internal testing can occur on whether or not sample inputs are stored in the calendar correctly. *vanessa wu, simran sethi, sabrina weiss, and rhana ishimoto were interviewed on features they would like to see in the planner.