In depth Presentation
Last Updated:- 12th June 2004
Click here to download this section as a WORD document.

System description.:- A menu driven system made up of a number of individual programs which share the same relational database.

GA027 - Plants and Gardens
With this program you can:
View the names of the plants in the database using the familiar A-Z navigation standard.
Add, change and delete plants.
Add, change and delete Gardeners, Garden Divisions and Garden Areas. Link and unlink plants to Photos.
Print a Plant Profile (optionally with a selected photo)
Work with Plant Specimens.

GA005 - The Garden Photo Program
This program is primarily for linking photos, not of individual plants, but of multiple plants in a bed
or landscape.

You may:-
Define Gardeners, Garden Divisions and Garden Areas.
Add, edit and delete plant profiles.
Link plants to garden areas.
Link photos (from a directory on your hard disk) to one or more garden areas. Screen shot
Assign titles to photos and list them logically by garden area.
Wrrite large memo type remarks for each photo.
Option to enlarge the remarks per photo to a full screen.
Zoom to enlarge the photo.
Drag shapes to set co-ordinates for plants in photos (referred to as Lassooing by our US Forum users).
Once co-ordinates are set you may:-
Point to a  plant. It's name appears on the photo.
Conversely, click on the name of a plant in a garden area list. A rectangle with its co-ordinates appears on the photo.
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 GA014    - Slide Show
Click here for a screen shot of the initial screen
Something to enjoy. Grab a cup of coffee and start this program. Select a display time for each photo, click on a button and automatically run through all the photos which you have defined in program GA005 using the Ideas Genie.
Click here for a screen shot during the show
You'll probably want to shuffle the photos into a logical sequence (You can do this in the module GA005 above). Impress your visitors.
This program has now been extensively developed to allow Pause during the slide show. When paused, a number of options become visible allowing: Show Photo title and details, Show Plant names in Photo (lassooed with a rectangle) , Show Plant notes for selected plant, Continue.
These new features make the software a valuable tool for Plant Society speakers.
Photos can be arranged and shown in Photo sets, allowing manipulation for talks.
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GA016    - My Garden                                                     
A simple program description. (Haven’t come up with anything better yet)
This program allows you to make a very presentable document to impress your gardening friends. It's the amateur gardener version of program GA015 (below)
You can print out any one of the gardens you have defined. Your own, your plant society friend's garden etc.
This is where you use the notes you've made in GA004 about each of your garden divisions and areas. They serve as introductory notes to the plant lists for the garden areas. 
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GA015    - Open Days - Tour Guides                                       
Something for the Public Garden administrators or garden owners who run charity events.
This program allows you to make a Tour Guide type document to raise some extra cash on your open days..
This program follows the model laid down by Dr June Weir, Lisburn who opened her garden each year to the public to raise money for her Church.
Additional features allow you to omit sections or individual plants which are out of season.
You can configure and reuse each of the tours you produce. You can produce a series of documents with areas and listings to invite potential visitors or subscribers to visit and view plants at their peak period of interest.
You can revise and reuse the document structures the following year.
This is where you use the use the data entered in GA004 i.e. those Garden Structure definitions and the notes you've made about each of your garden divisions and areas.
You copy in notes master records and produce duplicates for use in your presentation. Hence the introduction to any one garden division or area can be edited and stored to suit the season or event 
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GA004    - Work with Plant Profiles and Garden Areas 
This is the core program to the Ideas Genie system. It has its origin way back in 1994 and I used it for recording all the plants I had collected and more importantly, to store the information I was gathering from various sources on plants.

 Add, change and delete plants. Add, change and delete Gardeners and Garden Divisions and Areas. Link and unlink plants to Garden areas. Link plants to Photos. Three powerful screens for Global editing of plant properties and Cultural Requirements.

Define Plant Suppliers Catalogs. Create hyperlinks to Suppliers web sites. Create hyperlinks to the web page (where available) for the Catalog Items. Copy and paste Plant data and Plant photos from the internet into your plant database.

This is one massive program with hundreds of hours development time invested, and even then I had to draw the line.

Here’s the latest development. If you have a CD rewriter, you can toggle between your own database on your hard disk and a database on CD. The potential here is enormous. We can offer our users a copy of the “Best Garden Plants” database we hope to complete over the next few months. We can offer copies of co-operating Plant Suppliers databases. (If you are a plant or seed supplier, please get in touch)

The best wine to the last…you can swap gardens with other Ideas Genie users!

We’ll be encouraging this activity on our web site. You will soon be able to swap plants, photos and gardens with enthusiastic Ideas Genie uses across the world and make a CD collection of some wonderful gardens.

New: More screen shots. A step by step Lesson for this program from the Product Support site. Click HERE

GA006    - Query Program
Oh dear, the query program. This has been tossed about like a field of hay all summer 2001! Many, many  nightmares.
The outcome? An absolutely wonderful solution.Based on the data entered in the Global editing screens in GA004 you can build up very flexible and powerful queries to extract a list of plants to match very exacting criteria.
We converted an 8000 plants database for a client from Access format into the Visual Foxpro 7.0 Ideas Genie format and used this for testing. We were delighted with the results. Made all that hard work worthwhile.

Applications? Here are a few examples.

For the amateur gardener -  Extract a list of plants for your friends
e.g. Give me a list of plants suitable for Front of border or Middle of Border, can be Hardy Perennials or Hardy Annuals and in the colours categorised as Yellow or White. Output is displayed on screen. You can review and manipulate the list. You can expand or shrink a genus of plants and examine the other requirements or properties of any one plant or species in the list of plants returned by the query. You can drop plants from the list if they are unsuitable. When you are happy with the content, print the listing. The selection criteria is printed as a header to the report. 

For Garden Designers or Landscape Gardeners – Extract listings of plants from your database to suit your clients soil conditions or their plant preferences using the techniques described above.  

For Garden centres – Place a computer in your shop. Allow your customers to search your database for plants to suit their requirements using the techniques described above.
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 GA007    - Articles (or Resources)                                                  
Keep track of all the articles you wish to accumulate on plants. This is THE tool for organising your internet resources. Organise Web addresses by Category and Sub Category. e.g. Plant Suppliers, Seed Suppliers, Sites offering advice etc, etc.

Have you ever tried to categorise web sites? They dont fit neatly into one category, do they. Ideas Genie has the answer. Quite a number of versions of this program later and now you can multi categorise (and sub-categorise) your favourite web sites. Complex web sites can be found from any one of the defined references. And, of course, you can easily associate Plant names to the web sites where applicable.

Create Hyperlinks to web pages of interest (no more lost sites, and no more frustration trying to revisit that elusive page buried deep in a large site. Download (copy and paste) and save complete pages found on the internet. Assign Titles, and edit pages after downloading. Link these articles to a Topic (e.g. Cultivation, Pruning, Dividing) a Genus, or an individual Plant name within the Ideas Genie database..

All the above was a spin off, but is now the key component of this module. The original intention was to allow references to Books, Magazines and Word Documents, which, of course, it still does - admirably.
A VERY powerful tool. AND, the articles DONT have to be about gardening. Can be used to organise and categorise ANY www information. MANY applications, including a) preparing or saving lecture notes  b) rapid and contiguous retrieval of a series of pages from a variety of sites for use by speakers using a laptop and a projector. etc, etc!!!
Any document that can be shown in a Web Browser can be hyperlinked e.g. jpgs, gifs, pdf files, Word Documents etc.
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GA011    - Care Topics - Define                                          
This program allows you to define Care Topics for plants. e.g. Pruning, spraying, mulching, fertilising etc. The Ideas Genie places no limit on the number of topics.
A number of care topics are pre-defined and will already exist when you install the Ideas Genie.
Use this program when you wish to add any Care topics not included with the Ideas Genie.
These topics are then used in the Global Editing function in Program GA004 to define the care needed for the plants in your database.
The data is then used to generate tasks using program GA012.
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GA012    - Tasks                                                       
Wee things for you to do!
Based on the Topics created in GA011 and the information entered in Program GA004, you can generate a list of jobs to keep you fit.
You select a month. The Ideas Genie generates a list of plants which may need attention for that month for your review. Your cultural data is a button click away to allow you to make decisions e.g. Must do this month, can be deferred to next month or ignore. You can make up a number of tasks for the month, or interface with an ActiveX Calendar control to spread the task over a number of defined days e.g. a spraying program for fruit, potatoes, roses etc.with specific notes for each of the days.

In response to user requests, you can now make free hand to-do lists, using the integrated calendar if necessary to set specific dates for the tasks.
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GA003    - Cultural Requirements and Plant Properties - Define
This program allows configuration of tables used in the Global editing features in GA004.
The system is supplied with a set of standard query type statements. You can change these or add more as required using this program
e.g. you may not like our gradings for shade and want to use your own. You can edit ours.
You may wish to define hardiness gradings for your region. You can add more.
ideasforgardens.com are hoping to set standard options for a number of Culture Grades and Plant Properties (if we can establish agreement among our users!)
This will allow development of future plans for the Ideas Genie e.g. an add-on reference CD with a database of Plant names and their Cultural requirements and properties which can be accessed by the Ideas Genie and copied into your Plants database on your hard disk.

GA150    - Register Ideas Genie
Hyperlink to the Ideasforgardens web site and register your copy of the Ideas Genie on-line. Lifts all pre-registration restrictions immediately.
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GA151    - Product Support   
Hyperlink to the Product Support pages of the ideasforgardens.com website
View the latest version of the Ideas Genie Menu
View a list showing the latest versions of Ideas Genie programs
View the latest version of the Ideas Genie Tutorials
View the latest version of Ideas Genie HELP
Download latest versions from the site.
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Help and Tutorials 

GA001    - Tutorial Selection Program 
The tutorials are designed to get the message across as simply as possible. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous. 
The initial screen in this program has 2 list boxes :-Program List – Shows the Program Names and Titles of each program in the system
Tutorial List – Shows the list of tutorials for a selected Program.
When you click on a Program in the first list, all other panes are refreshed:-
(a) A full description of the program appears in a scrollable text area. These descriptions form the bulk of this document.
(b) Tutorials for the selected Program are listed. The Objectives of the first Tutorial are displayed in another scrollable text area.
Click on any Tutorial listed and the objectives are displayed. 

Starting (priming) a tutorial
Click to select a Program from List 1. Click in second list to select a tutorial.
Click on a button to “prime” that tutorial. You are offered the option to print the tutorial.
Tutorial program closes down

Running a tutorial
Tutorials are applicable to ONE program only. You must select and start that program manually
You must, of course, start the correct program to match the tutorial selection! When you run the ‘primed’ program (from the menu) a Tutorial icon is visible.
Click on the Tutorial. Read instructions, execute instruction.
If you take a wrong step the a warning message appears allowing recovery. (the Genie doesn’t get annoyed like some instructors!)
A Tutorial icon is always visible. until Repeat guides you through the steps to achieve your objective. 

Ending a tutorial
A tutorial ends automatically when you quit ANY program. After quitting, Tutorial buttons will NOT be visible even if you immediately restart that or any other program.
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GA002 – Help Program
You are pointed to this program by the “Getting started” document supplied with the system. Its really a listing of articles we need you to read to fully enjoy the system.
System restrictions prior to registration.
Product Registration instructions.
Product support instructions
Some boring stuff (Program screen and Report naming convention, Program Versions explained etc)
The important article:-Help icons and their use. A running tutorial teaches the faint hearted how to use the Help Icons and explore screens for help text. It really is simple. Thereafter, all help is via running tutorials and integrated help which we will now explain..

The Ideas Genie features an extensive integrated help system. Help icons are placed on screens where we need to explain particular features. Unlike the running Tutorials, whose function is to get a job done, you click and hold the mouse down to pick up the Help icon and drag a cursor (a black stop sign) around the screen. When you drag over a hot spot the icon changes to a hideous, but blatantly obvious, red. Release the mouse button and read the words of wisdom.

Linger in each screen and read all the help items to fully appreciate the full potential of the Ideas Genie.  You’ll soon be an expert.Repeat for any other Cult/Props Groups and Grades which you wish to apply for the Genus
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Lessons
Many users didn’t like the idea of Tutorials. It is my preferred method, but... I relented and created Lessons! Have to keep the user happy! Step by step instructions with screen shots for each step. These are proving to be very popular and, good news for you, very informative for surfers who have just found this site..
Click here to go to the Ideas Genie On the Web home page. Take the link to lessons.
New users are invited to register as a member in our Ideas for Gardens forum (its free) and join Ideas Genie “classes” and jump in to the discussions with other users, and me!
Not often you get the chance to have personal tuition from the developer of the software!
The group are collectively known as ForumFriends, and Ideas Genie database “swaps” are arranged by the users.
They are a fun group. Lots of chatter, a bit of banter and great gardening threads.
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