Football PA

I started out with an idea and by the time I went to bed it was a version one-point-oh really. The idea was to have a computer application that I could type in the numbers of a football player or players into a home team and away team text box. It would then print out the names of the players I needed to read off. It would give their number, name, and phonetic pronunciation if it is a hard one. This will make it easier for me rather than looking up numbers on two lists, trying not to lose my place and announce them. Now it will all be in one place.

I was last thinking of added a little yardage calculator that I could use to type in where a play started and ended for long plays and it will quickly tell me the yardage. It would have a button that would tell the computer the user crossed the fifty-yard-line. That will be an upgrade.

So far what I have is the simple form and a simple way of running it. It will read in text files, but they have to be formatted just right. I thought about using XML but I figured it would be easier to work with text files rather than XML because they are being built by hand. Maybe a future improvement will allow a copy and paste from something like an Excel spreadsheet that will have all the data there and then simply save as a text file. Then it would format the textfile for me. One other nice thing would be to read in a file and tell it to print it out on a legal size sheet of paper so I always have a paper backup just in case something goes down on the computer.

So when I got home from work Jon helped me out with some things to tie together the loose ends. It is working and ready for use this Saturday. I hope it will work like I want it to.

I may have to go and get a ten-key add on for the laptop or I may bring a normal size keyboard so I can more quickly type in the numbers. I choose to use the period as the number separator because the period is on the ten-keypad if that is the way I go, so I can do the whole entry and read out with one hand.