My 60 minute shot at making a Coda app for the festival

5yr ago

14 replies

Hey all, I was inspired by this festival to knock up a quick little app in Coda that is outside the normal tables and dashboards that I build for my startup. I wrote a blog post about it here detailing my thought processes and other challenges while building it: https://devan.codes/blog/2019/3/...

Replies

Paul Danyliuk @paul_danyliuk

@dsabar Thanks for the inspiration to build a progress bar out of rectangles :) For the festival I’m reviving my 7-year old habit building technique. It only makes sense for tasks where more means better (e.g. more yards walked, more words written for a blog, more minutes in focused work), so that's not really suitable for building on/off habits like "drink 2L of water". I first used Google Sheets for that, then tried to make an Android app as my first learning project (spent 8 months and still didn't ship). Coda looks just perfect for this task. I could recreate my app in a few days, from "never heard of Coda" to the "this can be used already, it has validation and dashboard and all" Still WIP though: https://coda.io/d/Build-a-produc...

Mar 24, 2019

Devan Sabaratnam @dsabar

@paul_danyliuk Thanks Paul! Good work. Time zones are always a head spin, aren't they? :)

Mar 25, 2019

Devan Sabaratnam @dsabar

@paul_danyliuk Nice work! And feel free to steal the Rectangle() idea for progress bars! :) I thought that Coda might have a progress bar widget that we could set programatically, but it appears not. Then while looking through the docs I saw Rectangle() as an available function and I thought "Why Not??". Works well, though I believe the scale of the bar is important as I found on the mobile display it tends to break longer rectangle pairs across two lines instead of side by side which is more effective.

Mar 24, 2019

Paul Danyliuk @paul_danyliuk

@dsabar Probably depends on device screen width, but I found that the width of 312 fits my screen just right (I have 3 sections). I saw Rectangle() in the docs too, but never thought of using it for the progress bar. Would have used a bar chart. I like how Coda is limited but still allows you to retrofit a lot of it for different needs.

Mar 24, 2019

Paul Danyliuk @paul_danyliuk

@dsabar P.S. As a way to give back, feel free to steal my local time setup widget: https://coda.io/d/Build-a-produc...

Mar 25, 2019

Paul Danyliuk @paul_danyliuk

@dsabar Yeah. I used to work for a BI product that had tables and dashboards with data types like "timestamp", "date", "time without timezone", "time with timezone", "date without timezone" etc… Ugh. Never again. Coda really needs better i18n when it comes to date/times. Setting doc's global timezone could be a start. But I think they're already working on adding proper TZ support (saw the thread on the forums)

Mar 25, 2019