Devlog #14 ->
Part 5 of 5

Finally! This final devlog is about the small tweaks I made in the app.

1. I made it have a new photo
   Small one, just swapped out one of the app’s images for something more current since the old one was from way back in devlog #1 and didn’t really represent what the app looks like anymore. Nothing technical here, just housekeeping.

2. It kinda works offline
   I say “kinda” because this isn’t a real offline mode where you can browse cached data with no internet, it’s more like the app now knows when it’s offline and fails fast instead of just hanging. Basically, I added a ConnectivityCheck helper that on web reads navigator.onLine (a free, instant, synchronous browser check for whether the device has a network interface up) so if you’re in airplane mode or your wifi is off, the AI scan screens can immediately say “can’t use this when offline” instead of sitting there for a full request timeout before failing. On native platforms there’s no real equivalent without pulling in a whole new plugin like connectivity_plus, so I just made the stub always report “online” there — an actually-offline phone still gets caught by the AI request’s own timeout/retry handling, just without the instant fail I get on web.

One thing worth noting: this only checks if the device thinks it has a network connection, not whether that network actually has working internet behind it. So a wifi network that’s connected but dead will still say “online” here. That case still gets caught eventually, just the slower way through the request timeout instead of instantly. Good enough for now though, this was mostly about killing the most common case of someone trying to scan with their phone in airplane mode and just watching the app hang.

1. I changed the load in screen
   Went back and reworked the loading screen from devlog #5. It’s now a plain CSS screen sitting directly in index.html instead of living inside the Flutter app itself, which means it can actually paint the instant the page loads, before Flutter has even finished downloading and booting up. That was the whole point: the old version technically only appeared once Flutter itself was far enough along to render it, so there was still a blank/white flash before it. Now there’s a little animated wordmark and spinner (the spinner’s colored arc cycles through the same colors as the logo letters) that fades out and removes itself once Flutter fires its first real frame.

While I was in there I also fixed something unrelated but annoying: Flutter’s web service worker by default waits to activate a new version until every open instance of the app is fully closed, which for something people add to their home screen basically never happens naturally. So people could keep opening an old cached version of the app for a long time after I’d pushed updates. Added a bit of JS to force any newly installed service worker to skip that wait and take over immediately (reloading the page once it does), so the next time someone opens the app after I ship something, they actually get it.

And that’s it, I’m all caught up! Five devlogs in one sitting was a lot, but future updates should go back to being posted as I actually build them instead of in one giant backlog dump.

Current problems / what’s next:

• Low MongoDB storage for free account
• Releasing the app (onto chief delphi to get feedback)!!
• Making it ready to release (working on the ? and report button)

Future ideas: team tracker, public chat for teams, judging/interview prep tool, callout tool, round robin generator

View it here: https://mirage54321.github.io/RoboLens/