Bin Day

Bin day is an original creation of mine that serves as my first official app. The app is a small app that serves a real need. Every Tuesday, when my family has to put the bins out, we have to walk to the road to check what bin we put out this week, then come back with the bins. Using this app, we can check what bin we need to keep out just from our phones.

The reason I chose this as my first app idea, was because the app itself was easy to implement; the users simply select their bins and with simple math the colours alternate. Even with it's simplicity however, it teaches how to create a basic app, use cloud storage, and taught me how to upload apps to the play store. As a result I was able to become confident in my abilities before tackling larger projects.

Showcase

Some photos of the app are shown below:

Creation

The app was built using Flutter, which is a mobile app development platform created by google. It uses a programming language called Dart. Flutter was easy enough to learn after learning HTML as the nested Widget structure of Flutter is very similar to that of HTML, and the styling using things such as padding are the same in both HTML and Flutter. I think it is possible to learn Flutter by itself, but as someone who tried that, I think there is a lower learning curve when learning flutter after doing some web development.

Something that might stunt beginners is how to use Firebase, which is basically cloud storage offered by Google. I found it really hard because a lot of the content was outdated and caused problems. For example some tutorials did not tell me to initialise firebase in my main file and Firebase doesn't work without it. YouTube videos by Mitch Koko helped a lot.

The thing that held me back the most was not being able to back up my code on GitHub. I was using a font package that was really large, and it didn't let me back up my code. While trying to bundle the app to publish it on the store, my code got messed up and I essentially had to restard the app. Luckily I still had the code so it wasn't too bad, but wasted a lot of time. I got rid of the font pack and backed all the code on GitHub so now it's all safe.