One of our featured projects this week is Stuff Organizer, a catalog application for organizing anything – books, movies, your pet rock collection – whatever you have that needs organizing.
I asked the developer of this project, Norbert Mereg, if he would tell us a little about his project.
[[ If you’d like to write a short piece about your project and have it published here, please let me know. ]]
Tell us what the “Stuff Organizer” project does, and why you got started developing it.
“Stuff Organizer” is a file catalog software for Microsoft Windows which helps people to organize videos, games, music files and eBooks stored on the computer. I use the internet regularly for downloading stuff I’m interested in. A few years ago I noticed that I have a lot of unorganized stuff stored in a single folder and I can’t find anything. This motivated me to write an application which can help me to organize these contents into categories and subcategories and allowing to tag them with labels.
I also wanted to attach descriptions, pictures and other contents to the movies from the internet. So I created a plug-in framework which allows third party developers to write extensions for the program. At that time I had another problem with the downloaded files. Those were often packed into multiple rar and zip archives. So I wanted to let the application do the unpacking for me automatically, and after that, – with the help of the ICS (Intelligent Category selector) – classify the files into categories.
At that time, I didn’t know how useful will be this for other people. I started developing it as an open source application.
What is planned for future versions of “Stuff Organizer”?
There are lot of features to be implemented. For example:
– Scripting based plug-in system, which would make plug-in development even easier.
– HTML-based description for each item. This would allow to include trailers for movies.
– Monitoring a directory for changes and organize the downloaded files automatically, without needing to start the application manually.
I develop Stuff Organizer in my free time, which makes progress of developing new features a bit slow. But I happy to hear feedbacks and feature requests from the users. Recently I’ve started working on an other project (also Open Source and hosted by sourceforge.net), which makes possible to collect anonymous usage statistics data and display
it on a webpage. This would allow me to turn Stuff Organizer into a more user friendly application.
How can someone get involved in the “Stuff Organizer” community?
Currently I’m the only one who maintains this project. I think the user base is not large enough to draw the attention of other developers. But I would kindly appreciate any contribution for other people, either in development of plugins or the core program.