FlipFlip

I admit, this one is purely a bucket list item. As a web developer, I'm jealous of the mobile app developers. There's something different about putting your app in somebody's pocket and knowing it's with them all the time. Notifications are the most obvious example. Certain apps, like my Gratitude Drop, are more useful when they can remind you not to forget about them.

The problem is that Swift, Objective C, or even Kotlin (for Android) are worlds away from the web languages I know. Everything about them is different, from the coding environment all the way through to how you test and deploy them. I just never had the cycles to learn a whole new development world like that. Especially if I had to pick one. I carry an Android, but everybody else I know carries an iPhone. So anything I built I'd either have to build twice, or choose.

That is, until Flutter came around. Flutter is a cross-platform development framework (technically with the Dart language under the covers, but everybody just talks about Flutter). Build it once in Flutter and generate Android or iPhone versions. Nice.

Once I learned that modern AI agents could speak Flutter, and that I didn't need to spend all my time in those development tools? I was hooked. I told myself, "Get something in the app store." It didn't have to be fancy. It especially didn't have to do anything I was deeply passionate about - I'd be crushed if I never finished it, or, worse, if I spent significant time on it, and it failed anyway.

So I whipped up a little productivity app, a "random picker". There are a bunch of them in the app store, so I know there's a market. As one of my testers put it, sometimes you need a coin, or dice to roll, or a deck of cards, and those aren't things you carry around with you. That's what this app does. Ask it to pick a card, it picks a card. Ask it to flip a coin, it flips a coin. You can also add your own sets. A parent can add their kids' names and make a "Whose turn is it to go first?" picker. Or let it pick from the set of your favorite restaurants when it's time to go out to lunch with again.

Sometimes a project has to exist just to say you completed it. Many times you'll think you're done with a project when really you're only done with the fun and exciting part. But there's still plenty of necessary and boring stuff that has to get done. Projects like this exercise those muscles, and help future ideas get out the door faster.