Organizational Tools?

[dakillakm Resident]

Hello pussy lovers! I am really enjoying my (quickly addictive) KittyCatS and have found so much great information here and, of course, in Saga's documents! So, Thank You for that.

At the moment I am really going to try hard to keep the number of kitties down to an absolute bare minimum. Currently I have one 29 day old Bengal Snow male, a 2 day old Aby Lilac girl, and a three day old Siamese Seal girl. I am DYING for the girls to become adults so I can start experimenting with breeding but back to the matter at hand. I want to use these lovely kitties to learn more about the breeding system and have a bit of fun before letting myself break the bank So, I am wondering if you guys use spreadsheets to keep track of your pedigrees? Do you just use the KittyCatS system (I'd wager a lot of you want to keep further records than provided by this system)? Or what other methods have you found to be most successful for keeping track of what your kitties are producing? Are there any spreadsheet templates floating around for keeping your personal records?

Thank you in advance for your help guys!

[Bea Shamrock]

Welcome Daki!!!!!! Tatiana Cheng posted once a spreadsheet template in the forum. Here's the link to her post: http://www.kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.php?tid=4233

I haven't used it yet and I'm still trying to get organized. One thing I do now s othat pairing doesn't get chaotic for me is to write down whether I'm going to pair two kitties again right after they've had a baby. I also look at the kitten and write down what I think are possible hidden traits and which parent they seem to have come from. If I re-pair the kitties I put a check next to their names, if I'm not sure I put a ? and if I prefer to pair one of them with another kitty I write that pair down and the new "bachelor(ette)"'s name below with a ?, indicating they're single.

One thing I'm starting to do with my new kitties, and that I wish I'd done sooner is family trees. At the moment I'm trying out a free software called XMind, which is a graphic organizer tool. I'm also thinking of making a list of all my female kitties and another one of all my male kitties showing age/DOB and where they are now ( a sort of census I suppose).

In the family trees I'm including shown and hidden traits. I keep thinking it would be soooo much easier if I'd started doing this at the beginning!

I hope this helps. I think everyone has their own system; more or less similar to other systems.

Have lots of fun with your kitties!!!!!

[dakillakm Resident]

Ok cool, I'll have to check out that spreadsheet! Yeah, I know I will never get them organized in the future if I don't start now. I already added the 3 I have to a spread sheet but it is going to need a lot of tweaking to be useful for extended family trees. I might check out that XMind software you mentioned too...

Thanks!

[Bea Shamrock]

=^.^=

[Rayne Morningstar]

Well I built my own sheet for Kitty Cats.. it keeps track of the age, the date they were born, Sex, everything I could need. it even has some tools to help me count how many hours or days until 100% love or how many mins till at 25% energy (counting down and counting up) I have it counting the traits of my kitties for me and does a Shown Trait compair between two kitties (I do not track hidden information at this time) but then again to keep track of other things I use the kitty cats tools as well. depending on where I am at.

[Tad Carlucci]

I was about 60% through coding a standalone tool to allow you collect and analyze your cats and export the data to other applications. But it was explained to me that using any computer program to analyze your cats is against the rules. I've put the project on hold and probably won't pick it up again, even though there is clearly demand for such tools, until I hear that KittyCatS no longer bans the use of computerized analysis of your cats (and, then, I might not pick it up because I've moved on to other projects).

[dakillakm Resident]

Wow Rayne! That sounds like you've definitely got it organized! Do you keep track of each kitty vertically or horizontally on the same table or individual tables for each kitty (seems like this would get out of control fast XD). I'm really thinking the countdowns/ups are useful for keeping track of all your kitties in a convenient way!

Tad, it seems like you are certainly right about their being a demand for a program like you were thinking of. What constitutes using a program? Surely spreadsheets wouldn't quite be the same since they are mostly for organization rather than "analysis"...hmm well good information to have either way Tad! Thanks!

[GhostCollective Resident]

I have to slightly disagree with you when it comes to using Excell to track how many cats you have, who has been partnered with who, etc. Using a spreadsheet in this case is no different then an accountant using one to track expenses and sales. I see no way that using a spreadsheet can "analyze" anything. I simply created the page to track my cats in the event I can not get online. I made it very clear in my post what the sheet was for and have not been contacted or told anything negative. Then again I'm not a programmer so, what I do is basically the same thing I do to create my budget. That is just my 2 cents. Thank you and have a nice day.

[Tad Carlucci]

I could easily write my system in Excel. But that would require you to actually have Excel. I chose to use C# because it would be more portable .. I could provide versions which would run on Windows, MacOS, Unix, even some cellular phones (if they have enough memory). The problem is that there really is no difference at all between Excel or C#, which I was using.

You may look at Excel and see "a spreadsheet" but when I look at it I see a relational database with stored procedures where the only difference is in how I choose to present the information to you (that table format you're used to looking at is just the default presentation in Excel, I'm not required to use it) and whether I'm using "cell formula" and "Visual Basic for Applications" or "C#" to represent the sequence of operations I want the computer to perform. When I explained what I was doing, I was told it would not be allowed because you (the user of my work) did not author it.

You may copy-and-paste the Pedigree, from your web browser, into your Excel spreadsheet. I chose to write my own web browser. You'd not be allowed to use my web browser because you didn't author it yourself. I could have Excel use Explorer to obtain the web page, and save you the cut-and-paste step, if I were working in Excel. Or I could write an Active-X control for Explorer and have it fire up Excel for you. All those methods, including cut-and-paste, sound like very different things, but they're really all the same. The only difference is which environment I choose and how the data shuffles around inside your computer. But, since you're not allowed to use it because you didn't write it, it doesn't matter.

So, if you wrote a program you call "a spreadsheet" and I wrote one I just call "a program" and others are allowed to use yours, but not mine, what's the rationale?

Oh, well, it doesn't really matter any more. I've dropped the project; which is probably what they wanted, anyway. I just wish, if that were the case, they'd at least have been honest enough to have said it instead hiding behind "rules" (which, if they're written down, I can't find; but they claim they're there so they must be somewhere).

[GhostCollective Resident]

Not that I am trying to argue, rather clear up a few points or really just one. That would be simply that I have never stated to write a program in Excell or any other platform, not versed in all the comp terms you posted and most went over my head. However I can tell you what I did do, I simply went to my computer's applications folder, opened excell and one by one typed in the names and parents names etc of each cat. There was no copy/paste or anything like that. There is no analyzier or anything complicated. Just wanted to clear that up for anyone thinking we are getting into some type of programmer war. (Not a programmer or anything techie like that at all)

Again not put to argue, simply clarifying in case there was misunderstanding