@lumilla/archivemanager

Escaping the Fever Dream

I’ve moved from Slint to egui for the UI, and I’m feeling much better about it, actually. Don’t get me wrong, slint is very cool, but egui is just easier, has more pre-made libraries and and I’m also a huge fan of the “window-within-a-window” aesthetic (because it feels enterprise)

How I managed to spend most of the time was battling with a fever dream. CIDOC CRM is the “International Standard” for cultural heritage data. On paper, it’s perfect and just the thing I want for this. In practice however, it’s… well, a nightmare, let’s say that. I tried to migrate to SurrealDB, since migrating to CIDOC would’ve really required a graph-based database. That went absolutely nowhere at all and I never want to see a graph DB again. Lessons were learned.

I now have a working prototype that displays a paginated list of items from the database. It’s rough, but hey it’s something.

Escaping Excel

I now kind of run of my local museum. Our current collection management system is a chaotic mess of Excel sheets where item descriptions, dimensions, and statuses are crammed intounorganizeds column. Commercial software vendors want an absurd amount of money to fix this. Screw that. @lumilla/archivemanager aims to be a open-source desktop app to fix this.

At this time I spent two and a half hours-ish drafting the foundation of what it will be. I opted to go with Rust to learn new stuff, and because it’s hot and trendy. I have never properly written anything like this before, so I read a lot of docs for my stack of choice (Slint, SeaORM). Learned a lot of new stuff, (e.g. Rust does not want a semicolon on whatever a function returns), came across weird “STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION” errors that ceased to exist the moment I tried to fix them.

Next up is the real functionality, currently the app is just a rough UI that creates a SQLite database.