Ghillie Tracks

Ghillie Tracks

Ghillie Tracks

©Patty Lindsay, 2009.

Overview

Ghillie Tracks is an application designed to help teachers, class managers, and dancers in the Scottish Country Dance community research and manage dance and music resources.

The three basic functions or modules of Ghillie Tracks are:

  1. DanceData Module: Search DanceData without being connected to the Internet, allowing access to the data from a laptop in a classroom environment. Also provides the capability of marking dances, publications, albums and tunes as "I Have" similar to the original DanceData application. You can import the "I Have" settings from the original DanceData into Ghillie Tracks. For a quick tour, watch the slide show.

  2. My PC Inventory Module: Facilitates managing a collection of SCD music stored on a computer (eg as .mp3 files). Once SCD albums and recordings on a computer are added, they can easily be found and played. Support for managing dance instructions and publications that are stored on a computer is planned for a future version. Future support for managing tunes is a possibility if there is interest. For a quick tour, watch the slide show.

  3. My Docs: Ability to build a list of recordings, dances, and tunes with notations for a variety of SCD needs, including play lists. Ability to create a lesson plan with links to play recordings and display DanceData information. Lesson plan fragments can be created and included as needed in other lesson plans. Examples of these fragments are teaching points for a specific step or a plan for teaching or reviewing a specific formation. For a quick tour, watch the slide show.

Ghillie Tracks addresses three types of SCD resources:

  1. Resources that have been entered into DanceData: You can search dances, tunes, publications, recordings, and albums through the DanceData module in Ghillie Tracks. You can also access the DanceData data on My Strathspey at http://my.strathspey.org/dd/query/.

  2. Resources that have been entered into DanceData, that you own: In the DanceData module within Ghillie Tracks, you can mark dances, tunes, and albums that you own as "I Have". This is the functionality provided by the registered version of the original DanceData. You can also enter an ID as a key to where in your collection the resource can be found.

  3. Resources that have you have on your laptop: The My PC Inventory module of Ghillie Tracks will help you track and access the SCD resources stored electronically on your computer. The current version only supports the tracking of albums and recordings, but support of dances is planned for the a future version. The My PC Inventory module supports the tracking of albums and recordings that may or may not be in DanceData. If the album/recording is in DanceData, than it can be associated with the corresponding DanceData album/recording and additional search capability will then be available for your My PC Inventory recordings.

Copyright 2009 Patty Lindsay

Ghillie Tracks is free software. If you find it useful, donations are appreciated so that we can continue to support and enhance this product for the Scottish Country Dancing community.

Ghillie Tracks is generally distributed as an executable using ZZEE PHPGui, see http://www.zzee.com/phpexe/ for ease of installation of the non-technical user. The source code is available by contacting Patty Lindsay at patty.lindsay@gmail.com. To utilize the Ghillie Tracks source code, installation of a PHP web server and sqlite3 is required. Interfaces with the Windows file system is enhanced by ZZEE PHPGui, but alternative interfaces are provided when running in another environment.

You can redistribute the Ghillie Tracks source code and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Ghillie Tracks is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.