Another short and sweet update today.
The dashboard has always been one of the most useful and powerful pages of SnekLog. I didn't want to change the best parts of it, but since it was being rebuilt I am taking the opportunity to take some of its weaknesses and make them better.
The dashboard remains mostly the same, but it has gotten a facelift to account for the new UI. The dashboard is now distinctly broken up into 3 tabs, "Dashboard", "Info", and "Photos". The new layout is much easier to navigate on mobile and saves you from needing to open up the sidebar, or click on the reptile's primary photo to open the gallery which was, admittedly, not very intuitive. The new photo experience will be shown in more detail in a future development update.
The biggest complaint I have gotten, and personally felt, was that the graphs on the dashboard were not very useful. I've taken into account a lot of feedback and reworked the graphs from scratch to actually be useful instead of just existing.
In particular the food to weight ratio graph is actually now a true ratio. It takes into account the weight at the time of the reptiles feeding (and will interpolate for in between weight feedings). In the image below, each bar represents a feeding event, which you can touch or mouse over to get details for the % food to weight ratio and the green line represents a trend.
Some minor UI updates to the way event history displays to make it a bit more touch friendly. It also shows you how many events are logged in each category, and you can page through the event history without the page reloading on you. This should save some of the headaches that I know existed with reptiles that have very long histories such as this one with almost 300 feeding events logged.
While SnekLog was always capable of being able to filter the home screen based on the statuses of Feeding, Shedding, Medications and the like, I wanted to expand on that functionality and take advantage of some of the more powerful things React is capable of doing over the legacy Flask codebase. One of the most useful things I came up with was a Notification Pane.
The notifications are broken up into 5 categories, all of which should cover the important aspects of our critters.
Each category is given a button that will show you live what is due across your entire collection, and it takes into account things like Fasting. Just like the icons on the home screen, the Feeding notification shows you who is due or overdue, and who is fasting. You can also click on an animal from the notification to be taken directly to their dashboard. I'm thinking about making it take you to the respective event entry page but that feature is TBD.
In this example, I have 2 snakes due to eat today, but they are "fasting", and it's separated out in the notification pane. I'm still going back and forth on whether or not fasting critters should add to the count in the icon bubble, so stay tuned for a potential change in that behavior.
Medication will show you a red icon/number for animals due for meds, but it will also show you future recurring or repeatable medications you have scheduled for your animals. In this case my St Bernard King Bumi is in SnekLog so I can keep tabs on his Flea, Tick and Heartworm medications.
Shedding is more of an informational notification, but my spouse and I really like to keep tabs on how long a snake has been in their shed cycle, so this notification will show you how long they have been in their respective shed cycle. In this example, Felix and Eclair have been "In Shed" for 3 days, while Lily has been "In Shed" for just 1 day.
Cleaning and Weight work just like the others and will show when the reptiles were due and how long they have been overdue.
It's coming along slowly but surley. I cannot wait to have this bigger and better version of SnekLog out to everyone.
As always, thanks for using SnekLog! TJ