Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

Love the program. Use it a lot to store and contemplate my own tarot readings. Love that you can put up your own background & customize many features. I'm thinking of a couple 'quick-hit' type of enhancements, (hopefully) small efforts that may go a long way to make the program more useful for me and others.

One of the things I like to do with readings after spreading them is to contemplate the lwb or other comments, such as i might enter in the reading wizard. When I display the reading in the main window however, and depending on the length of the comments, sometimes these are cut off in the pop-up text. I understand it may be possible (using .Net env.) to modify the popup slightly so that a user can press F2 or other key to gain access to the rest of the (cut off) text. In any case, my request would be to be able to see even super-long text in the card popup notes.

Of course, the ability to actually EDIT the comments from the popup window, and be able to save them to the reading would be outstanding, as this might be a more natural way of editing the reading comments by contemplating the cards as a whole.

Have you ever considered going open source with the project? I am a (database) developer & I'd certainly be willing to help out, if the time needed would be too much for you. I'm sure there would be others around would would also consider rising to the occasion. I suspect they may even be able to help with translations, etc., and you might be able to multiply your work effort.

Some other ideas I've been kicking around include alternative reading interpretations (more than one set of 'LWB' comments--different authors' and/or practioners' card comments).

Overall though, I certainly like the idea of the program, and that you don't pre-can a formulaic interpretation, but that Orphalese is a simple and elegant card-laying program.

Let me know if I can be of any assistance,

->Rich J.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the great input! I didn't realise you could not see all the notes when looking at a reading pop-up. This used to be an issue with the normal pop-up notes, and it was pretty much solved by making the program respond to the mouse-wheel when there are pop-up notes showing. If the notes are too long to fit an icon appears to indicate that you can see the rest of them by scrolling. I say pretty much solved because it relies on the user having a mouse with a wheel. I thought I had applied the same fix to the reading notes but obviously I didn't - it is now on my list of fixes for the next version ;-)

I agree about the idea of being able to edit the reading notes directly in the pop-ups. I thought about that a couple of times but I can't quite see how to make it work in terms of the program's design. It could not be an edit button on the pop-up note itself of course, because the pop-up disappears when the mouse leaves the card (e.g. by entering the pop-up). The Reading Wizard is a bit clunky but it is at least easy to find, and everyone who already saved a reading knows where it is and how to use it.

The trouble with the open source idea is that it would basically have to go hand-in-hand with making the program free. This works as a business model if there is some other source of income, such as advertising, or a subscription for online services in the case of Second Life etc. At the moment it costs about 120 USD a month to keep the project going, most of which goes on the dedicated server required for the P2P exchange. I sell about two programs a week which just covers this nicely. If people could compile and distribute their own versions of the program I don't think many people would bother registering. On the other hand it would save those who can't afford to from the perils of downloading a "crack" which could well contain malicious code for generating spam email, spying for bank account details etc. In these times of global doom and gloom I am actually thinking of adding a post to the "How To" section along the lines of "How to Enjoy all the Features of Orphalese Tarot without Buying a Licence", i.e. by renaming the three decks you want to use to come top of the list alphabetically before starting the program (even if this is rather stating the obvious!), precisely to save hard-up users from this danger. Any corporate marketing people out there want to start sponsoring a tarot program???

As far as help with translations and so on goes all offers are very welcome. I am still planning to implement the wiki-style translation site which I mention in the "About Orphalese" part of the main website. I am hoping to do this in the summer of next year. If you were interested in creating any add-ons or external tools for use with the program, whether to market or just to offer free, I would be happy to co-operate on a technical level.

Cheers
Richard

RIchard:

Actually, now that you have mentioned it, I did try the middle scroll wheel and it did produce the desired route. My only issue was visibility of the interface: I could not tell that this would scroll the notes. Some of the ones I've seen elsewhere advised you to press <F2> to scroll and/or edit, etc. A function that is not visible to the user of an interface is not as useful...

As to editing popups, much would depend on the language/version used to implement the program, the degree to which it's object-oriented, etc. In one of my 'past lives,' I've done some wild stuff with xml persistence layers in IBATIS SQL Maps (they've recently adapted that for .Net), but we'd probably have to discuss further offline to proceed.

I appreciate your thought on open source. For the reasons you mentioned, I would agree that's probably the best choice for now. You're secret's out (it's not very hard to figure out how to change decks), but I'd like to believe that there are others who believe in supporting good software, especially when it can potentially wake an interest in the divination arts.

Anyhow, good luck in your endeavors and contact me privately if there's anything you think I could help with.

->Rich

Ｉ appreciate your views!!!