A quick update surrounding the development of the completely rebuild app and the current state of things.
First off, all of the "static sites" (LongTailReptiles.com, sneklog.com, help.sneklog.com) have been successfully migrated to AWS and are now running in a cloud-native setup. The servers than ran those websites has been decommissioned. There's still some changes that those websites will see, but the conversion is done. Instead of using Grav CMS for writing this blog post, it's all now being done from the same application (VSCode) as I write all my other code from.
Next up, the new application is starting to shape up with a lot of the building blocks starting to come together and I wanted to show a bit of what things are potentially going to look like. Everything is Work-In-Progress so things will likely change as I refine the experience; especially the color palette and theme.
The UI is being built from the ground up with considerations being taken for a shared Web or Desktop experience. One of the biggest changes is that static sidebar on the left that you are used to seeing heavily interfered with mobile UI design and had to go. Instead, the buttons that usually sit there (Filters on the Home Screen, Quick Events on the Reptile Dashboard etc) will be incorporated onto the individual pages. I'm taking a lot of care to make sure no ease of use is gone as I'm sure I'm not the only one who dislikes the modern trend of hiding menus inside of menus.
Other than the general UI change, the Home Screen layout is the biggest overall change that users will notice. I'm still going back and forth on if this is the "final" layout, but since this app is going to be using the same general codebase and styling for both web and phone apps, it naturally needed to move to something a bit less visually dramatic.
Even though the interface has been simplified a bit, the functionality of the home screen, and entire app is going to get more advanced. The top right of the screen now shows "notifications" for animals that have upcoming or overdue events. I'll have a more detailed post about notifications a bit later once that is a bit more fleshed out.
The filtering for Status, Categories, Cages, and Needs remains basically how it works in the current app. However the new app does things "live" so you can click on each filter without the entire page refreshing.
This is just the first small updates of many as I build each component of the app. I'm working on the Dashboard next and should have an update to present later this upcoming week.
I'm excited to get this long overdue update out there for everyone and as always, Thanks for Using SnekLog! TJ