(I have been busy enjoying my summer, so this post comes quite late relative to the project(s) contained within. Below is a (mostly) chronological log of the work I've done for the end of May. I just finished another project that I started in early June, and a post on that will be coming soon!)

May 20 2022:
I realised that I'm not very good at naming my projects as you can probably tell. Anyway I digress; I've been making some good progress on the todo "app" (I'm not sure it qualifies as one but let's call it that for now) which I briefly mentioned in my previous post.

Most of what you see is placeholder content, but at least I've got the layout down for now.

Also, I guess I never learn—even after an absolutely tragic attempt at implementing light/dark mode for my personal website, I still went and tried to implement simple custom themes for this app. But the scope of this app is much smaller, so thankfully everything worked out in the end. I even managed to drastically mitigate the flickering on reload, but that's likely in no small part due to the app only having two real sections to switch between.

With how it's set up in the css file, it's no problem to add even more themes down the line (the hard part is coming up with good colour schemes).

That said, the app is still not fully operational; here's a short list of what to work on next:

• Using localStorage to save incomplete/completed tasks (pretty rudimentary but essential)
• Ability to write notes on a separate 'notebook' (nice to have)
• Categorisation of to-dos (if I can...)¹

The UI right now also doesn't really accommodate for more than about 5 categories or notes. And it's pretty much unusable on mobile. But I just want to get it working for now.

At this juncture I'm also thinking about converting the web app into a desktop app using something like Electron². It would be nice to design an app icon for that too.

May 21 2022:

• Saving tasks with localStorage works now, still need to re-implement completion of tasks due to refactoring of code
• Implemented ability to rename tasks
• Will also work on ability to delete incomplete/completed tasks

May 21 2022 (late evening):

• Okay Why Is Everything Everywhere Breaking All At Once

May 22 2022:

• I took a break from the code (may or may not have touched grass) and with some simple refactoring, the code works again. Also implemented the ability to delete tasks.

I have also decided that implementing javascript animations is too complex and unnecessary for the time being, so I will redirect my focus to making a somewhat passable MVP, so that means working on a notes portion of the app (which I initially set out to do).

May 23 2022:

• Managed to implement a notes section, code adapted from here.

May 24 2022:
Launched the project using Netlify. Now live on todo-today-simple.netlify.app. Please don't visit it on mobile, it is very much broken there (my bad). This will do for now. At least it works, if somewhat clunkily.

As an aside, my favourite theme is "Wine":

!!! BONUS !!!
My fingers were still itching so I decided to create another simple app, adapted from the 8 ball mini project from codecademy's basic javascript crash course:

The code for this is particularly simple:

Also live on magic-8-ball-simple.netlify.app. It was relatively quick to put together. I think I'm getting warmed up to web programming! Next up, learning React. This might just be me learning to fly before walking but let's see how things go.

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1. I could not. Unfortunately, a bit too complex for me right now. Keeping track of localStorage between different categories, toggling between views... seems like a much easier task with React and not vanilla HTML & CSS. Maybe next time! ↩︎

2. I looked into the process of converting web pages into Electron apps and stumbled upon many articles and guides online, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Maybe it's a good thing because Electron apps are infamously bloated. Still, it would have been cool to see this small project turn into its own native desktop app with a nice accompanying icon. ↩︎

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