02 April 2024
I’ve also noticed an interesting trend among the Viz App users. People will frequently log the viz from several days back, or even a week ago!
There’s not much use sharing ‘old viz’ - since most dive sites change quickly. Also, the app only aggregates the last 3 days when showing dive site summaries anyways.
This tells me that people are adding old logs… because they enjoy filling out logs! In particular, people are interested in keeping a history of their personal diving. I quite enjoy scrolling through my logbook and remembering past months as well!
Earlier this month I added picture-uploads to viz logs. When filling out a log, there is a button to add a ‘Top Shots’ section with photos. As the Viz App supports more data, I intend to add more of these optional sections.
For now, ‘Add Dive Log’ will be the next of these sections. In the future, I might have an ‘activity’ field. Depending on what activity you select (diving, snorkelling, spearing, etc.), you would get some more detailed fields to fill out.
As always, every field is option in the Viz App! After all, this is for fun, and no one find mandatory data entry particularly fun.
It’s best to get something simple out quickly, then expand on it later. For now I’m including just the most basic dive log details
We’re faced with a myriad of annoying forms to fill out throughout our lives on the internet. Bad validations, excessive requirements, glitches, etc. can become so infuriating. The last thing I want is for the Viz App to be annoying!
Accordingly, I have a few design opinions I try to follow for making input more “fun”
According to my first bullet point - I would rather giver users a button instead of a typing field to enter all the dive log details.
A common component to do this is called a “Stepper”. It lets users press an add/subtract button to change an input by a set increment for each tap. Usually, you can also choose to type instead if you prefer.
These steppers are available in SwiftUI on iOS, but not on Compose for Android. As such, I’ve been working on my own version this week.
I will try to finish up the dive log entry for this week on iOS & Android!
After that, I’ll be looking into some more feature to help everyone share their logs on socials, see some more personal stats about their contribution, and a few others. I’m hoping to encourage folks to get the word out & also encourage some viewers to become posters themselves!
Hope ya find some good viz out there!
