User interface designers are underrated

I had never paid much attention to how apps look, but now making my first mobile application, I realise how important it is, the fact that the styling is very similar to css (I hate css) is useful for simplicity, but I have a bias from so many small mistakes that take hours to fix. Apps need the user interface to effectively tell the user what each button does, or to put attention into the main aspect. Most people would not look twice if an apps design is bad.

New stuff

• Finally implemented the possibility to change time between new compliment generating

• Bunch of bug fixing

• And most importantly: The interface

Because this is my first mobile app I must say the starting design code sucks, so I have been stuck at slowly rewriting old systems so they actually work with all the needed features. For the interface I have to rewrite the entire styleSheet for it to look okay.

Hope that I can finally release soon, and not into 99 more bugs

IOS development is impossible

maybe exaggerating a bit, but from all of my reserch i have found out that you need a mac or IOS device to be able to test IOS, now I do not have one of those .-.

What does this mean:

I am not gonna be releasing a IOS widget, because of not being able to make it high quality, let alone test it

Instead I am gonna release it as a android app, and if it gets enough requests, add IOS support

Now what have I done instead

• Had to remake the file hierarchy.

• Customization with themes for the widget and app design.

• File sharing and uploading.

I am afraid to say I am a bit ashamed of how long it has taken for me to fix simple mistakes.

Customization

One of the most important parts about a widget is being able to customize it, now that is using custom themes, maybe it would be a cool addition to let people able to make custom themes, but will have to see

I HAVE A WIDGET

I am overly happy because it just did not appear for 2 hours because I thought some line from the documented example was just a “random comment” "use no memo";. Now reading back it makes so much sense. I was insanely wrong. Adding it fixed the entire widget .-.

also this widget -> only for android.

and I can only hope making a ios one wont break the android one.

on another note

having to balance async and sync functions is a pain. had to rewrite my entire data saving system to be able to handle getting it synchronously. While doing so also found a nice tool to save data synchronously. Should I rewrite my data handling to only use one way to save data, probably but for now it works, when I get to the optimizations part and code cleaning that should get sorted.

Overall

must say it is a nice feeling when using some new language finding so many new tools while making a simple project, in the moment -> “Wow my headache could have been easily avoided”, but good to know the next project will be 10x faster.

Not too much left to make:

• IOS widget

• Widget customization

• Polish the app

But it is probably gonna take a good amount of time still.

Making phone applications is actually way more fun than expected

okay it was partly because I switched to a new framework which makes everything more comfortable.

had to rewrite all the file reading and writing, but it was 100% worth it.

Now the only main thing left is the widget itself

after only making my phone overheat multiple times, got the timer system working for a random compliment to appear every xx amount of time.

The app is coming togheter well, only

• widget

• styling (Pain😭)

• improving user experience

is left

I wanted to learn how to make phone apps, so my idea is to make a widget app, that every day displays a random compliment from a big list.

Fighting with github and emulators was not fun to even start developing, but luckly was able to get all that sorted out.

Was it easier after then, no, never developed something like this, everything looks so alien. Thankfully documentation exsists.

I want the user to be able to make custom compliment lists, and add his own, so I started by making a system where you can create your own compliment lists, add compliments into them, and then they get saved in the apps data as a json file.

hopefully adding the widget will not be too hard.