QR Code Scanner... Another one?

Kay
January 12th, 2022

QR Code Scanner

Yes, it’s that time of the year when everyone remakes an existing app that has thousands out there. This time I made a QR Code Scanner that’s entirely web based and can be added to home without installing another app. The limitations are that it more or less only works on Chrome/Chromium based browsers due to using new Web APIs. Furthermore, it’s only for links as it’ll redirect to them immediately.

 Unlike other QR Code scanning apps, that support all QR codes, including text, mine is just for links. By only supporting links, it can redirect immediately to a site, thus being more efficient compared to other apps.

 This was a fun project, the advances in Web APIs make things that were only possible via an app extremely simple. You can even scan barcodes, although my app doesn’t support that, isn’t that amazing?

Check out my QR Code Scanner App.

Completely ad-free, no trackers nothing, just you, the camera and a qr code.

Player Picker: An Easy Way to Select the Start Player

Kay
November 14th, 2021

Visit Player Picker for a easy way to pick the starting player. Just put your finger on the app and then it’ll randomly select a person.

The biggest issue with board games is that picking the first player can be a tough. By nature, humans are political creatures with all forms of alliances, but in a simple and fun board game session, you don’t want to show overt favoritism. However, subconsciously, this can come out. In addition, there’s only so many ways you can decide who goes first, whether it’s by age, birth dates, heights and more. Overtime, it’ll be the same person starting, thus you’d need to constantly come up with new ideas just to pick the first person to start!

 This is where Player picker comes in. All you need to do is place your finger on the app and it’ll randomly decide who starts. It’s designed for up to 8 players, although, in theory, the limit is how many touch inputs Chrome supports. By designed for 8 players, I mean I only added 8 unique colours.

Now, if you’ve already played some board games, you already know these apps exist and they’re quite good, so what’s the difference between mine and all the others? Basically nothing. I just made this because some apps only support 6 players, whilst mine supports 8. Besides that, there’s no real difference. You could even say it’s worse in terms of visual features and animations. The main reason I made this was because I wanted to.

 Instead of installing another app, Player Picker is a web app that can install to your homepage, a Progressive Web App (PWA) as the lingo goes. It was surprisingly difficult to find libraries with multi-touch capabilities I wanted. It doesn’t seem to be that fleshed out. One that I found, Interactjs, hasn’t been updated in months so I don’t know whether the library is still being maintained. In fact, the hard bit was trying to search for and use multi-touch libraries because I didn’t want the hassle of native touch fuckery. In the end, I had to use native touch fuckery anyway because existing libraries didn’t have what I wanted. That was the most frustrating developer experience I ever had.

Why would I create an app that already exists and its done better? What value does that have? My question is if it always NEEDS to be valuable to others to have value. For me, the app has infinte value for it was an amusing and worthwhile development experience. Messing around with multi-touch and Progressive Web Apps taught me a lot. Now, it’s not going to be an app many people use, for most people, whether it’s a PWA or something downloaded from the app stores doesn’t matter. But, for me, not needing to install an overly bloated app, having everything run as the web is great. An app is extremely unnecessary for such a simple application. All it needs is touch capabilities and animation, something that existed for years in the web. In the future, it’ll be completely offline and hosted statically, meaning I won’t pay a cent for it, thus will remain online for as long as the CDN exists.

 On a side note, isn’t it amusing how overly philosophical I needed to get to justify creating an app for fun?


Starting Player Picker

A New Blog

Kay
October 1st, 2021

With this article, my blog has officially came to life!!!

I’ve wanted to create a blog for over a year now and have been started and stopped numerous times. Sometimes I gained a mad burst of inspiration and really hammer down. But this feeling would inevitably fizzle out and die.

 My day job is technically a web developer so I thought this would extremely easy. Just need to sit my ass down and whip something up, but it wasn’t. You see, I wanted to use new technologies and new methods and all that shit. So I researched, tried, found it’s too damn hard and then played some games instead. This process repeated for months and months.

Why did I suddenly start now? Time has been accelerating for me, I cannot be stuck on this blog and leave all my other ideas to the wayside. Thus I tried to make things simple as possible

 But Kay, why even bother create your own site? There’s so many easy ways to get a blog out there these days. Hell, you don’t even need to code, use Medium or Substack and boom, instant blog. Why waste over a year, fucking around, instead of using existing options?

There’s this side of me that likes creating things, likes the thrill and the challenge. Sure I could do some clickty click and get my writings out there. If I didn’t use Medium or Substack, there’s Wordpress and Shopify to use. Why bother creating something that already exists?

 There’s a danger in that logic, everything in the world has already been created, eventually you’ll never create anything. But that knowledge isn’t yours, you don’t know how to create a website, create that blog, use Laravel, Vue and hack up a CMS. Only by creating can you transform what is in your head to the world. Also, it’s fun. Just using a premade solution is boring, there’s create joy in the craft of things.


So that's the story on how I took over 2 years, dicking around, really not doing much, constantly restarting the project, to create my simple ass blog.