Ship
🏯 禅文 Zenwen Day 11: SHIIIIIIIP!!!!
Finally! Zenwen is shipped for the first time!
(but expect lots more to come)
Live demo here: Zenwen Demo, bear in mind all data is temporary and will be lost if you refresh.
QoL Improvements
Learning languages is no longer tedious. Handle everything you need in 1 place without complications.
- Supports every language! There are 3 things you can add when creating vocab: character, pronunciation, meaning. This means you could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics to Hindi as a French speaker if you really wanted to.
- Search for decks, and vocab! Forgot what deck some vocab is in, or just have way too many decks? No worries, just search for it!
- My Dictionary, all your vocab in 1 place! Simply want to see how much vocab you have or are just skimming through what you know? This is the perfect feature for you.
🐉 Chinese word of the day:
- 进步: progress, to make progress
- Pronounced: jìnbù
- Example: “我有了一点进步”, “I have made a little progress”
🏯 禅文 Zenwen Day 10: EVERYTHING WORKS!!!
Finally!
What I did during these 44 minutes
Long story short, there was an indexing error when a search result wasn’t found.
It was supposed to give a message like “no results matched your search”, but instead, it gave a big scary red screen saying “index is supposed to be less than 1: 1”.
I had no clue what was wrong. Took a while to figure it out.
Turns out I was stupid and trying to do widget.myDictionary.length when I was supposed to do widget.myDictionary["vocab"].length.
What’s coming next
Ship!
Everything is ready. Expect a ship tomorrow if I can set up the demo correctly!
🀄 Chinese word of the day
- Word: 买
- Pronounced: mǎi
- Example: “我买了筷子。“ - “I bought chopsticks.”
🏯 Zenwen Day 9: everything works!
Well, for now, at least.
Overall, pretty quick and easy day. Simple bug fixes, simple feature expansions.
What I did
- Fixed logic for when it was searching through My Dictionary for
Stringsthat match the search - Switched some 0s to 1s and stuff so it wouldn’t make duplicate search results or have indexing errors
- Added a search bar to the edit deck page so now you can search from every screen!
What this means
I’m almost ready to ship!
Project works well enough to be tested, GitHub is up to date with commits.
All I need to do is make the README and get a live web demo up and running!
🀄 Chinese word of the day
绿茶 (lǜ chá): Green Tea
- 我喜欢喝绿茶！
- I like drinking green tea!
🏯 禅文 Zenwen Day 8, SEARCH BAR WORKS (mostly)!!!!
Learning Chinese is hard. Zenwen makes it easier.
Create infinite decks and vocab and find them easily!
Apparently Expanded() widgets can only go in certain other widgets, so I was stuck solving bugs for nearly 45 minutes. Sometimes I question why I like coding.
The logic for searching vocab is broken, but that was just me being dumb. Should be easy enough to fix.
Will need to do heavy optimizing after I ship because I wrote it in probably the least efficient way possible, but it’s fine for now.
Chinese word of the day: 飞机 (fēi jī)
- Means “airplane”
- ”这是飞机” = “this is an airplane”
🏯 禅文 Zenwen Day 6 & 7 (I swear that isn’t on purpose)
TL;DR
- Finished My Dictionary; now there’s a master list of all your vocab! Great for if you want to see your progress or just forget a word.
- Starded working on a search bar!
- Worked on making my computer less laggy (no time logged for this)
The Search Bar
What’s the point in being able to make a bunch of decks and vocab if it takes too long to find them? Exactly, there is none.
Today I started working on adding a search bar to the header of the app.
Surprisingly, the logic behind it is pretty simple. Just iterate through the Maps and Lists. If an item matches your search, add it to a results Map.
What I Learned
You know those simple, boring headers at the top of basically every app?
That’s what us Flutter devs call an AppBar.
Apparently, AppBars have multiple parts:
- leading
- title (already knew about this one)
- trailing
- actions
- bottom
The bottom is what I use for the search bar. Essentially, the bottom is an extension of widgets that are below the title.
In order to make it work, you need to give the Scaffold (the parent of the AppBar) specific details about the extension so that it renders properly. Specifically the height, which can’t be dynamic.
🀄 Since you made it this far
Chinese word of the day: 吗 (pronounced “ma”)
- used to turn a statement into a yes or no question
- 你喜欢茶: You like tea.
- 你喜欢茶吗: Do you like tea?
🏯 禅文 Zenwen Day 5: documenting & my favorite feature!
(and fixing 1028 issues with my computer)
⌚ TL;DR
I added lots of comments to the code so that future me & other people can easily understand the code. Also started adding a cool feature called My Dictionary.
📝 Adding comments (finally)
Wanna know something I never do? Add comments.
Well at least not until today.
Today I spent most of my time doing a well needed cleanup of the codebase, adding comments and making it readable to future me and other people.
Since flutter can quickly start looking like a random jumble of widgets, adding these comments really helped me understand exactly what everything is doing and will help others understand as well.
📕 My Dictionary, my favorite feature!
I also started working on adding a major QoL improvement, a deck that contains all the vocab you’ve created.
Have you ever had a word on the tip of your tongue but just can’t quite remember it?
That’s no longer a problem.
With My Dictionary, you can open it up and quickly search up that word in just 3 clicks.
You can also see how much vocab you have created, which feels amazing when you see how much you’ve learned!
🪲 1028 issues with my computer
Don’t ask.
I don’t have any answers for you.
I checked Lenovo Vantage and now it finally makes sense why my computer struggled to run the file explorer.
After a few hours of a well needed scan and fix by Lenovo Smart Performance, my computer now runs (mostly) smoothly once again.
🏯 禅文 Zenwen - Devlog 4️⃣
👋 你好！ Zenwen is an app to help people learn Chinese. As someone with a 970 day Duolingo streak, I know what us language learners need.
⌚ TL;DR
HIT THE 10 HOUR MARK 🎉
Today I made the vocab page and made it so you can delete decks. I also polished up the graphics a bit.
📕 What I Learned
Today I learned lots of useful things!
I learned about some new styling for Material() widgets, along with 4 new widgets:
- Stack()
- IntrinsicHeight()
- Expanded()
- Padding()
Also learned how to make if else statements in ListView.builders!
🗣️ In depth summary
Today’s main objective was making the vocab page.
To do this I used a simple ListView.builder to iterate through the vocab lists.
One issue I had was the layout of the vocab. I wanted an equally spaced horizontal layout with a delete button floating at the right.
This was a problem because I only knew about the Row() widget. In order to get the layout I wanted, I had to learn about Stack() and IntrinsicHeight() and Padding() and Expanded().
Another thing I ran into was that it crashed when I deleted all the decks or all the vocab.
In order to fix this I learned about if else statements to create different widgets based on the conditions!
👣 Next Steps
I’m almost ready to ship!
I still have to make a few things though: a master vocab deck, and ideally a search bar. If the search bar goes well then I can also add filters for the decks if I decide it’s worth it.
🏯 禅文 Zenwen - Devlog 3️⃣
你好! Zenwen is an app to help people ACTUALLY learn languages. As someone with a 970 day Duolingo streak, I know what us learners need.
The first thing I’m making for the app is vocab decks, and I’m almost ready to ship this!
Today was focused on displaying the actual vocab in the decks as well as being able to add new vocab.
Learned a lot about how to handle inputs in Flutter. This morning I realized my button layout wasn’t very convenient for users, so I had to rearrange it, which forced me to learn about InkWell, which will help me learn a lot moving forward.
🏯 禅文 Zenwen - Devlog 2️⃣
你好！ Zenwen is an app I’m making with Flutter to help people ACRUALLY learn languages. As someone with a 970 day Duolingo streak, I know what us language learners need to actually be successful.
Made a lot of progress today!
I developed a basic display of vocab decks, which includes: title, description, practice button, edit button.
Also made a way to create new vocab decks, by clicking the button at the bottom right.
You can’t view or add vocab yet, that’s hopefully coming tomorrow.
The UI is pretty bare bones right now. I’m focused on functionality before I make it look good.
As for bugs I encountered, the entire app crashed when I switched from using a stateless widget to a stateful widget. Quickly discovered this was me being stupid because I forgot to restart the app. Apparently hot reload doesn’t like big changes between stateless and stateful.
🏯 禅文 Zenwen - Devlog 1️⃣
Zenwen is (will be) an app to help people ACTUALLY learn languages like Chinese. As someone with a 960 day Duolingo streak, I know exactly what us language learners need.
My first ship will be a tool for making and studying vocab decks to seamlessly fit in with your day.
Today was a short but productive. The app is basically just a blank screen on the front end, but the systems are falling into place in the code.
Today I developed the system for storing vocab decks.
Now it should be fairly easy to add flashcards and other study tools.
The first hour or so of the day was spent fixing VSCode because lots of things were breaking. It said my phone was connected, but it wouldn’t show up. The Flutter extension also stopped working.
Changed the name from Zhenwen to Zenwen. Zhenwen has religious cultural meanings, so I want to respect that. 真文 means “true text”, which has meanings in Taoism. 禅文 (technically chánwén) essentially means “peaceful language”.
For your entertainment here is a screenshot of a stupid bug that confused me for 30 minutes. 99k pixel overflow.
Can’t wait to see what the next week will bring and watch this app come to life!
