It has been a while since I made a blog post. This is supposed to be a weekly thing, yet this has slipped my mind for the past 5 weeks. I will be more intentionaly about doing this weekly in the future.

I do not remember exactly what I did these past 5 or so weeks, so I will just write about what state the app is in now. There is a centralized theme for the admin page and general list page that I am finishing up. There are still a couple of odd things happening with it that I fix as I see them. Overall, having a generalized theme is much better than what we were doing before so I am very happy about that. Flutter is a little odd with its theme, the way you would expect some things to work are not exactly how it would work. For example, in a theme you have to specifiy a primary and an onPrimary color value. The theme automatically applies the onPrimary color to a lot of widgets that are on a primary - colored thing. But this does not apply everywhere and I often have to specify further in the theme the exact widget and what color it should be. This is annoying, but not the end of the world

We had our beta testing with the class last week and it did not go as well as I hoped. The images took forever to load, there was confusion about the UI and suggestions for optimizing the UX. There were a number of glitches that were found that Dylan and I had somehow not encountered before. This week was mostly a week for fixing a lot of those issues. The biggest was the realization that the images we were uploading and pulling from the database were simply too large. So, I found an image compression package and it works extremely well. If I had done this at the start of the year, I wouldn't have had to fiddle with image related stuff so much. Images now load almost instantly and I can see no real downside to this. Another big change is the new anonymous user function. It didn't make sense to gatekeep the entire app behind a login screen, so we make the user anonymous by default and prompt them to register or login when they try to access the profile page. Additionally, the register page is now the default rather than the profile page. There was confusion about why the login page was the default when the app remembers who is logged in. Users will probably not be logging out much when the are logged in. Additionally, site reviews are closed to anonymous users and a snackbar will appear telling the user to login or register to rate sites.

There are a couple more critiques we had from the beta testing, and quite a few more bugs, and I will try to handle the rest of my share of them this next week.