Birb of Wisdom

History

I sometimes find myself with a few spare minutes of the day - whether on my lunch breaks or when I'm finished work for the day and have nothing else planned. In these short 30 to 60 minute phases of my life I find myself sometimes coming up with unnecessary or daft programming ideas that sometimes - in the case of Bean File Type and Viewer for example - I will see if I can make the concept work in a short enough amount of time, and if I can, how far I can realistically take the idea with my spare time.

I can't entirely remember why I decided that I needed a bird to give me infinite wisdom in the way that an 8-ball does, but I decided that's what I needed - so that's what I did.

How It Works

The Birb of Wisdom is in it's essence, an incredibly simple application. This is probably why I was able to create a more or less fully fledged final copy of the vision within a 15 minute portion of my lunch break. The application takes a simple string of text from the user that it can base an answer on. To generate an answer, the application simply uses a random integer between 1 and 9 (but can be expanded in the future if I feel like adding more possible outcomes)

Random rng = new Random();
int randomNumber = rng.Next(1,10);
switch(randomNumber){
case 1:
Answer.Image = new Bitmap(Properties.Resources.Answer1);

Each outcome has it's own associated image that is stored within the project's "Resources" database. They can be pulled as a new Bitmap image from this database and displayed within the pictureBox known as "Answer". As of version 1.0 there are 9 possible answer images. Can you get them to all show naturally? It's no fun to brute force them ;)

Changelogs

Version 1.03

• [New] The application and it's installer are now both digitally signed with a code signing certificate.

Version 1.02

• [New] Added the ability to automatically download and install updates.

Version 1.01

• [Fix] Fixed a bug where the application would sometimes show the same image repeatedly regardless of the query changing.

Version 1.0

• [New] Released the Birb of Wisdom! Featuring 9 visual answers to simple yes or no questions.

Licenses

End User License Agreement (English) 965 Bytes RTF Rich Text Document [Download]

Troubleshooting

If you're having issues installing or using Birb of Wisdom - please see the following topics to hopefully find a resolution.