By
@estella
My therapist recommended I try using a pomodoro timer when doing schoolwork. So I decided to make my own (: Currently, work mode is set to 25 minutes and break time is 5. Once 4 cycles occur, a longer 15-minute break occurs.
My first application and Python project. This definitely took wayyyy longer than I anticipated. I hit some roadblocks due to my code being so unorganized; I probably learned the importance of planning out your program before you write it after this. However, I’m pretty proud I was able to see it through to the end (: and I actually like how it looks, which is a surprise to me. Download the exe from the dist to try it. (I hope it works from that, I have no other device to test it on!!!)
1h 3m 36s logged
Dev log number 2!!!! After adding the sun, I decided, why not make a day-night cycle for each pomodoro session? This proved harder than I thought, yet again. Originally, I was going to make the sun set and the moon rise from the bottom of the screen; however, the canvas would cover the entire screen, and you wouldn’t be able to see anything. I figured out how to arrange the widgets in layers, but to my dismay, the boxes underneath the widgets would cover the sun/moon. According to Google, I can’t make widgets transparent, so I opted to make the sun and moon switch places horizontally across the screen. After successfully setting up this system, I took on the challenge of changing the color of the background; however, that meant I would also need to change the background color of all the widgets and buttons too. I ended up going back and putting the hex color I used into a variable and creating another variable for the night color, then it was just a matter of switching whether the day/night color would be assigned to the skycolor variable.
10h 3m 29s logged
wow I’m really bad at coding! Ok so we are working on a fun pomodoro timer because all the ones I’ve seen are ugly, and unfortunately this one isn’t an exception, but its my baby so we love it anyway. Currently the freaking sun is in half, and we have about 60 if elif statments because I’m literally yan dev reincarnated (no im not that was a bad joke sorry) Anyway, my takeaway is plan first, then write your code, not the other way around!!!!!! Also— dont name important variables “meow” thinking you’ll remember what they mean, spoiler: you won’t. The most difficult part of this project so far has been, unironically, not the timer logic; rather, it was the graphics. And I thought that would be my strong suit… sigh…To be more specific I could not for the life of me figure out how to position labels and containers where I wanted. My next step is to figure out how to allow the user to change break times in the app, not just the work timer.
