Learning C project

Stand Up Set Helper started as a command line desktop program written in C. I was learning C programming and had been doing comedy. I had noted the idea of an application that helps assemble sets. (“Set” means performance.) The idea was that it would help by letting the user assign tags to jokes, allowing the user to easily pull up all of their dog jokes, for example, and instantly assemble a sequence of jokes about dogs. Jokes work better when they segue into and build on each-other. Putting together jokes that deal with the same subject matter makes them segue into each-other, naturally. Manually assembling a set this way is laborious, but I knew it could be automated to be very fast.

So, I made Stand Up Set Helper, for the sake of doing a program in C. It worked pretty well. It read data from a TXT document. It was not meant for distribution.

Android

A year or two later, I knew how to make Android apps, and I wanted to make Stand Up Set Helper for Android. The idea called for a mobile app. Comics come up with jokes at random times and they use their phones to record them.

This would be a fuller application than the C app. This would be a comedy material manager, with a focus on speeding up the process of constructing sets. I looked on Android Play Store and didn’t see any stand up material manager apps at the time, 2016.

The core workflow is assigning bits to a set, and arranging the sequence of bits in a set. The other big features are the tag feature, the alternate version feature, and the import & export feature.

Alternate versions allow you to store multiple versions of a joke, allowing comics to edit jokes without losing earlier versions. One version is always assigned as the default version of a joke.

Importing and exporting allow comics to easily move data in and out of the app.

Data can be typed in, spoken in, or imported. Assembling sets is as rapid as possible. The comic can organize their material with tags, and can store limitless jokes, versions of jokes, and sets of jokes. Sets can be duplicated or combined. It’s a useful tool.

Other features include:

• The Random screen, which randomly cycles through all versions of all jokes.
• There is a text size setting, so you can make the text small or large, easily.
• There’s a way to do a material purge, to export and delete a selection of jokes that you’re sick of looking at, but may want to check out again, in the future.
• There’s a way to export a specific set to a document.
• You can import from or export to cloud storage applications or device storage.

Here’s the instructional/demo video:

Links

Stand Up Set Helper on the Android Play Store