Off To See The Wizard
I'm now heading home from my trip out today. It's probably no big deal for most of you, but to me it's been a strange experience - almost reliving my high school days. I also picked up today a set of earphones - listening to music is a hell of lot more entertaining than the cacophony that comes from a heap of people wondering around different shops. I think I need to get an mp2 player though - it's not practical (or possible for that matter) to listen to music while I'm walking around with the laptop switched off in my bag :)
But anyway, I'll shut up about all that.
While working today, running around in the back of my mind has been some thoughts about wizards. Sometimes in applications that you write you might want to include a wizard for something. A wizard is easy enough to write, but everytime I've written one it's always been purpose-built specifically for the application in question. I've done a lot of hunting, and the only reusable wizard I've been able to come across is the windows installer - which is very suitable unless you're trying to install something :)
What would it take to write a reusable wizard library?
I don't want to go all out and provide a set of different screens like the windows installer packages do, but something that at least takes care of some of the pain would be useful - and to more people than just me I imagine.
I've already mentioned how I'm working on a little app for uploading files to blogs. In it I need a wizard to configure it for first use (which is why I've been thinking about this). I might put the effort in and try to make the wizard part of it reusable.
But what I want to know is if it's worth my time. If I worked something out and packaged it up, would people find it useful? Let me know.