Hey, folks: I agree that the current state of logging software - on all platforms - is pretty stale. This business of having bespoke platform-restricted programs, each with its own peculiar ways of doing things, feels very dated now. The plethora of ham logging applications in development suggests a lot of other people feel the same. Unfortunately, almost all of them are one-person efforts that seem to get off to a strong start, then languish.
Rather than having individual developers dive right into coding more soon-to-be-abandoned loggers from scratch, I think what needs to happen is for a group of code-literate hams to come together and decide on a general approach, then pursue it together. I've been thinking about two potential strategies, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses. Because I've been learning game coding recently, I've thought about building a logger in Godot, the open source game engine ( https://godotengine.org/ ). As a game engine, Godot has a slew of built-in functions for displaying information, and this could produce a logger that looks really cool and is fun to use. Cross-platform compilation is built into the engine, so releasing packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and web should all be feasible. The main drawback to this approach is that I suspect the number of hams who are also into Godot is pretty small, so the developer pool might be kind of restricted. That said, Godot is not that hard to learn, and its internal scripting language is very much like Python. The other strategy would be to build a logger in some Javascript-based web-like framework, either with Electron or as a progressive web app ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps ). Everybody and their mother has some relevant coding skills in the underlying languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript), so there's a huge potential developer pool, and these sorts of applications are inherently cross-platform. I think the biggest challenges would probably be things like rig interfacing and possibly performance issues with logs containing huge numbers of QSOs. Until such a project gets underway, I think we'll just keep muddling through with the current mix of applications. -- --Alan (AB1XW)
