Ajustment to the new reality

Wow 5 month already ! I am ashamed that I didn't gave news in 5 month !

Well the honest truth is that I spend a lot of time with my baby daughter and that I have no regrets about this, but I should have keep you more in touch ! I also went back to the office, and therefore I don't have a lot of time during my days. I am working all day long, and the few hours that I have left during my day, I spend them with my daughter, cook, go to groceries, and try my best to sleep.

My daughter is now 5 month old and start to be more regular to sleep. I am getting back to a normal level of tiredness. I feel a new energy and motivation. When I build an app I don't build it only for me. I build it also for her. I already have a future idea of for a different web app that I would like to commercialize. But I want to finish properly Flowmodoro first. To keep me away from the YouTube productivity black hole, I decided to make myself a temporary desk in the leaving room, without any speakers. This make YouTube way less attractive.

Design changes

As I spend more and more time with my app, specifically working on the Statistics screen, I realize something : I don't like the design of it! Maybe I saw it too much already, but things does not make sense to me anymore :

• Neumorphic design is nice, but not for everything. For example I do not like the way the settings looks. This is why I reviewed the setting screen like this.

• The tab bar does not really make sense and should be removed to have more space. Settings and statistics have been moved on the top right corner of the app. The history is now accessible directly with a button on the main screen. The goal of the history screen will be to quickly be able to edit a past entry. For now editing an entry is still to be done.

Colors and times

The colors I used for the stopwatch and a bit everywhere in the app are not really relevant. I changed them to this scheme :

• Purple when we didn't reach the minimum focus time (the stopwatch is filling up)

• Green when we reach the minimum focus time to pretend to a break. We are now in a flow state.

• Red when we reach the maximum focus time, we need a break because our focus is not a quality one anymore.

Yes, I decided to add a maximum focus. By this I mean that all of us, if we are focus during 5 hours in a row about something, we should take a break at a point of time, because our brain is melting. I think that if a user don't like this feaure he can put a maxumun focus time of 100 hours and will never get bothered by it.

Statistics screen

I made some decent progress with the statistics screen, specifically learning how to use the excellent fl_chart library. I first implemented a basic chart and then added some selectors to select the zoom level for the data : week, month, or year.

I could make a bar chart pretty easily. Once we get how works the library thanks to all the examples, it is pretty simple. Most of the complication is more about how to extract the data from the SQLite DB in an efficient way and make calculations on it.

I also had to implement a way to generate fake data in the database, this will be usefull later in case of UI testing.

I realize that I should probably refactor soon to use Isar https://isar.dev/ instead of the default SQLite, for better performance. Because the app could struggle a bit when loading the entries for an entire year. But this will be for later !

What is next

One missing feature would be the entries edition, to give the ability to edit a past entry. Then I think Dark mode is important to be here since the very first version of the App. My phone is set to swtich to light to dark mode at night, and I would appreciate my app do be able to do so as well. Then a bug report system is a must to be able to have feedback from user crashed and be responsive in correcting them. I also need to think about a pricing model. If I want to continue developing this app, I will need some financial motivation. I will not want to make the user a hostage by keeping his data behind a pay model. This is why I have to think about something fair. If you keep your focus thanks to me, that could worse a bit of compensation don't you think ?

All what is left on my list are more "nice to have" tasks. But for example, shorebird would be amazing to push corrections quickly. Isar could be also nice because it will be difficult to change the database system afterwards. As always I share with you my list for the sake of transparency.

See you on the next update !

If you like what I do, and would be part of the private Beta, register yourself here :https://flowmodoro.thenomadcode.tech/