One of the things I’ve been diletanting with with my extra free time the last couple of months trying to build a mobile app using Flutter, which is a framework that’s supposed to be write-once, run-anywhere (where have I heard that before?). Between ChatGPT and me, we’ve actually completed something and got it approved by the Apple App Store.
It’s a little thing that lets you pick boxing or footwork drills and then run them where the app (in my voice) calls out the numbered combos and the strikes if you want to hear them.
It’s not a big thing, and I expect to make about the same off of it as I make from this blog (more, actually, since I don’t actually have to pay money every year for its continued presence, and $0 is greater than negative hundreds or thousands after a couple of decades).
But it does represent the first application I’ve actually completed in, what, 25 years?
I often have ideas for applications or Web sites that I start messing with until I get to a difficult problem which I can’t figure out or find an answer to. Where I shelve it to come back to it later. And often, I don’t.
I mean, I have a project I’ve had the idea for for a decade, and I’ve started writing it in a couple of different languages, but hit a spot (JavaScript promises or having to re-write the front end in a different framework like Angular or Razor) where I just let it go.
But the Boxing Drill Companion? I tried writing it in Swift/SwiftUI natively for iOS (iPhones), but ran into difficulty handling the audio playback (it requires playing the same audio files over and over but in different order for a duration of time). But, last year, in a job interview, someone asked me if I had experience with Flutter, and I said, “No,” (and didn’t get the job). So I (we, with ChatGPT) tried it in Flutter.
To be honest, the LLM has made the difference, I think. Instead of a Web search that yields ten years’ worth of Stack Overflow answers, it gives me a couple of quick answers presumably up-to-date which I can try out and ask further questions if needed. It doesn’t always get the answers right–I got the correct solution for the last problem I was having myself after ChatGPT could not give me the right solution after three tries–but it is pretty helpful. I’m going to miss it when the AI boom collapses.
At any rate, it was briefly gratifying to complete a thing. And then it was followed very quickly by the normal sense of “If I have done it, it must be easy. If I have not done it, it must be impossible.” sentiment that is part of my core operating system.
