Tuesday 8 December 2015

did I say I was finished?

So this evening has been fun working on the app (lunch.ben.best)

I've got some things working, I've also decided the way I need to move forward so:
New features:
You can now by clicking on it modify the serving date / time of the meal.
I've started on, though it's not entirely there the work to add a new meal, there's lots more to be added there, but I have a plan.

It's still really interesting to return to things that I worked with a long time ago and some of the bits are really clever, getting the checking working so that it validates dates, some of the other bits that "just work". However I think I'm going to have to split out a lot of the Meteor functions so that they are separate to some of the helper methods for the steps or meals functionality. Returning to the "time" object that I'd worked on was a nice feeling of finding something I'd done nicely in the past.

I think when I next get some time it will be time to add to the wireframes.

I'm currently waiting at the hospital for a scan (nothing serious), and it's the run in to Christmas, so I'm guessing updates will be quite sporadic.

Wednesday 2 December 2015

fixed it again (again)

So I've spent a couple of evenings and I've again got my little app working locally it has been interesting re-visiting things and as ever getting code working I worked on a year or so ago.

lunch.ben.best is now running the latest version of the code (and I've checked everything into github). I'm at the point where in theory it would be possible to use the app to cook a lunch, though it wouldn't be a lot of fun. So now is the time for improving the app to make it really usable.
Then get it so that others can use it.

When I left this I had started playing computer games again, last night I decided to leave the conquering of Europe do some coding while the kids were asleep, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but while it's interesting I'll keep going. You never know I might end up with something interesting at the end.

I'm currently working on being able to change the time to serve the meal, this led me into the interesting place that is the input type datetime-local. It still surprises me how incomplete the specification and support for the HTML5 input types are. On mobile devices this box is lovely, however it's not supported on IE at all and the chrome support isn't exactly thrilling. I'll probably look at some plugins to see if I can't figure out a better solution, but I'm going to be continuing with the "get it working, then get it pretty" maxim.
I think the next steps are:
Allow date/time change working
Allow multiple meals
Allow multiple users to have meals
Sort out adding / editing steps so it's "nicer"
Pretty up everything (including making it "reactive")

I'm sure I'll find more steps and do some out of order, but it's nice to have a line in the sand, even if it then gets rubbed away.