XGolf

Xgolf is the codename for a top-notch, professional golf package being developed in house by the Xclave staff which will calculate personal statistics as well as handicaps. In essence, we want to write a professional package which will provide all the security and functionality of a high-end professional Club-level handicap system, which will also be of use to individual users.

The idea of the Xclave feature project is simple enough: We're going to write this program in ANSI C/C++ to be used as a CLI application first and foremost which should be essentially platform independant. Then, we're going to document the process of taking this application to a pure YellowBox and its GUI design environment.

The XGolf project is an internal project, and will not (as yet) be open source. But we will be documenting many of the different stages of development including source code.

An even longer project is a Carbon version. This is by no means a concern right now, however. Though it is definitely on the to-do list. Then we can document Carbon development vs. YB development as well.

We will be releasing occasional binaries of the project from time to time in order to keep you abreast of what we have accomplished so far.

If you would like to suggest features, changes in the way the program works, or anyt other input, feel free to e-mail us.

So just keep checking in, and check out the main Xclave page for news on XGolf.

Key features

We are striving to make this as cool and functional a program as possible. The following is a list of the eatures we hope to include in the initial release of XGolf. If you should have any suggestion, just e-mail us and let us know.

• Multi-user support
• Multi-course support (multiple tees, separated slope/avg., male female, course info)
• Encrypted information storage
• Handicap support (only for certified systems)
• Personal stat calculation, including (but not limited to):
  • Overall scoring average
  • Scoring avg on Par 3,4,5, and 6 holes
  • Breakdown by denomination (pars, eagles, triple bogeys, etc.)
  • Greens in regulation (automatic calculation)
  • Fairways in regulation
  • Sand save percentage
  • Penalty strokes
  • Driving average
  • Costs
  • Time taken on course
• Remote data access
• Report generation
• Membership tracking (dues, functions)
• Message boards
• More…

Status reports

• Status Report #1 (February 23, 1999)

News

The future of Xgolf:

After playing around with XGolf ideas in ANSI C for some time now, and figuring out a good jumping off point for the development cycle, I am going to just sit down and try to hammer out a YellowBox version of the program. For me, I haven't ever used Objective-C, and I don't really know the power of the YellowBox API. This will be a good learning experience for me, and hopefully for you at home. Some nice things to note will be the mixture of handcoding and graphical development, for which I have gotten a taste of from the examples included in the developer documentation.

In time, perhaps we can look to open up the project, but for now I'm just gonna take my sweet time getting used to this new development process. I will be playing with Interface Builder in the near future and try to hammer out a nice interface for the program. If you should have any suggestions on which database we should look to use with XGolf (for records) or any other aspect of the design of this program, please email us. All help is welcome!

The Xclave is a member of the Macintosh News Network
All content - ©1998-1999 - Mark J. Hershenson