River gets Rebuilt

I wanted to provide a quick update for anyone following the progress of Project River.
I'm still hard at work on her in most of my free time!

What's Been Accomplished

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Twitter Integration (read tweets, not write them yet)
Facebook Integration (read news feed, not write to it yet)

Currently in Progress

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I am currently in the process of porting River over to the QT framework. This lets me easily create a graphical user interface for River. So far I have her quietly running in the task bar with a nice little icon.

Some benefits of porting to the QT Framework

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1. Easy use of Windows Task Bar and an actual window.
2. Everything except the Speech component will be Cross-Platform (work on Windows/Mac/Linux)
3. Everything will be Unicode -- so it will work with Twitter and Facebook much better.
4. A lot less "dependencies".
1. Before I was using all sorts of libraries that would have to be installed on the system. Now, it'll just be QT stuff.
5. A lot less licensing issues because of #4.
1. If Project River is a success and I wish to commercialize her, I'll only have to buy the commercial license for QT.
2. Before, most of the libraries I was using wouldn't have allowed to me to ever sell River.

Next Steps

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I'm a long way from being done with my rebuild of River. There's a lot of re-writing of code and a lot of new things to learn (I know how to do them, but not how to do them in the QT Framework).

Specifically, I'm focused on getting the Speech engine to work properly. This is a big jump, because while I'm still using Microsoft Speech, I'm using a very different method of "listening". It will work better once I have it completed -- it won't "hear" better, but the program will work better.