Today is the last day of a long weekend (for Australia Day), and I made some good progress on my GoodReads statistics app this weekend. I didn’t do anything last weekend as I was dealing with a cold and just didn’t feel good.

I’ve essentially got the basic UI and statistics working at this point, in a Windows desktop app using WPF. I eventually want to produce a cross-platform desktop app and/or a mobile app, but this was a good starting point as it let me leverage what I’ve been learning at work.

This is what the app currently looks like.

It’s quite basic looking, but given the nature of the app it’s never going to need to be complicated. I need to do some cosmetic improvements, but it’s functional. The only thing really missing from the basic functionality currently is the ability to persist challenge data and the ability to have data for more than the current year.

I’m not sure how complete I’m going to get this WPF prototype before I start looking into cross platform variations, but I think I’ll at least try to persist data as I have some thoughts around how I want to do that and it’s work that should be largely reusable when I start looking into rebuilding the app.

It’s a been a long while but I’ve finally thought of a personal coding project that I care about enough to actually have a go at.

GRChallengeStats

The project is GRChallengeStats. The goal is to produce a simple app, in a variety of formats, that will provide me with a number of statistics related to my yearly GoodReads Reading Challenge.

Why?

These stats are fairly simple, but they aren’t something that GoodReads provides, and I find them to be both interesting and motivating, the book percentage required per day one in particular, as a small percent of a book per day is a target that always feels quite doable. So this project provides data that I both enjoy and benefit from.

Additionally, this project is something I want enough that I should have sufficient motivation to build it to a point where it’s usable. I’ve already done a command line version, but that was mostly a proof of concept to help nail down some of the objects I had in my head. The primary goal is to use the creation of this simple tool to help me learn how to build a mobile app.

This project is simple enough that I feel like there should be little excuse for me to ever really get stuck enough that I would eventually give up :).

I mentioned a “variety of formats” above. Because this app is very simple, I think it may be a good tool for experimenting with different frameworks for producing apps for desktop, mobile, and cross platform. We’ll see how I go, but I hope to learn at least a couple of different app making frameworks by the time I put this project down.