ive decided to stop this project for a reason. I just realized that I just did something that I shouldn’t have done. Im going to spend all my cookies now and wait for the next program, and try to make sure that this never happens again.

Devlog 8

Lots of learning today again! Here’s a short rundown of things that I’ve gotten ahold of during yesterday+today’s coding:

• How to use react native links to link webpages together
• How to use the GPS and access accelerometer data for better accuracy in questioning the user
• A better undersatnding of usestaseets

In addition, I also redesigned the registration page UI and the login stuff. It was a lot quicker this time to port the login logic from the old page to the new one since they’re both in React Native, but still quite time consuming since I faced a lot of issues with firebase when going through this process…
I decided to go with a more modern UI design but I’m not sure if it emphasizes the Michigan part enough, I might want to do that in the future! At the same time, I’ve also been working on a demo video for this project which will introduce the problem and explain the solution.

Devlog 7

A bit of a shorter workload for this devlog, but still quite productive. I’ve started to get the grasp of react native a little more but it is still very unusual for me and often frustrating, especially since I’ve never done react before! But here’s a short rundown of stuff that I’ve gotten ahold of now:

• Integrating JS functions and logic inside of the code
• Using React Native styles
• Refactoring the Firebase login system into React Native, although that process is still underay!

Also some more minor fixes to the web version of the project and cutting down on the dataset created each time a user is made. When I amde this project I initialized a bunch more arrays than I needed and now userData only controls 2 arrays, which is cleaner and more usable.

I guess if it counts I also wrote a short Readme for the project which was lacking!

I guess the biggest part of this devlog was being able to port the login logic into React Native, and now the login system works! Its a little clunky under the hood but it should work just fine in practice, and there are also some security things to fix but I’ll get to that eventually.

Devlog 6

Kind of a mixed day today. First 45-60 minutes of this devlog were spent fixing issues regarding the uploading migration feature, which had some mismatches and utilized the unused miles feature. You can see in the video now that the total time added up is now correct, as in the previous devlog it just concatenated all of the strings together as one. Also fixed some parsing issues with the road type and standardized the data so its easier for me to work with later.

For the rest of the period, I decided to get started with React Native! After a short tutorial and testing out for a bit I’ve started to work on the basic design and test it on an IOS simulator. The learning curve is a little strange since everything is familiar but also so different in execution, but I kind of replicated the login page that I wanted? I began to implement the firebase dataset inside this and I’m planning on fully implementing that later!

Many things learned about React Native today, many of which I don’t like……

Devlog 5

Begun working on the design process for the app! I’ve identified a style that I like and I’m probably going to keep this until I find something more appealing or professional. I took some heavy inspiration from RoadReady Ohio and other apps, but I will be sure to make it have its own identity eventually. It took quite some time for me to get something that I liked, most of my previous attempts felt too unprofessional but I’ll probably still make it more serious later.

After that, I’ve begun to implement this design in the actual HTML (Just the Login bit), as well as adding little page animations that I hopefully won’t regret when I try and migrate this project to React Native.

Speaking of React Native, I’m also gonna be starting to research how I’m gonna migrate over and how to make basic projects in React Native. I think that after fixing up some of the issues with the driving log migration features, I’ll start building in React Native very soon!

Devlog 4

Pretty big devlog, the main thing that I’ve been working on is the migration function from RoadReady to this app, in which you can upload a file and it’ll parse it into driving logs for you. It utilizes a regex and then also string splitting to identify logs inside a PDF, before then populating the entire drive log. Understanding how regexs work and how to get it to work consistently across formats was quite difficult, but I do think I learned a lot from it.

It took quite a lot of iterations to get to this point, for example just trying to iterate through each character to find patterns or potentially using an AI api to look through the parsed text to try and find it, but I think that I’m happy with what has come out. Obviously there’s a lot of discrepencies and the app still looks like buns, but hopefully that’ll change soon!

Right now I’m working on creating a design for the app that actually looks good, also is gonna help me start structuring everything.

Devlog 3

A smaller day today, but quite a bit of work still! I started working on making some of the UI elements look better, although I am kind of struggling a little bit because I’m having trouble deciding what kind of theme I want to go for for this app, so for now enjoy this generic looking UI style as I fully design it out.

This first week for Lockin I don’t really think that I’m going to start working on the design just yet, I’ll do that in Week 2 and work on rewriting it into React Native Expo by Weeks 3-4 along with additional features such as GPS tracking that would need huge rewriting if I did do them as PWAs.

The big thing that I did today was further flesh out the driving logging to fulfill all of the Michigan requirements (Weather, time of day, start time, road type etc.), as well as making those show up as driving logs in the main menu. I added more functionality to delete them as well.

I’ve also begun work on a file parser to allow for easier migration from RoadReady to this app, because many people probably wont start from 0 using this app, improving the UX although that bit isn’t completely finished yet!

Devlog #2

Started work on a bottom bar for design, the plan for it is to have all the pages on that and the profile picture part be able to switch between children for a parent to control in a family, but I don’t think that I’m going to work on the actual design of the website until later.

Today, the big thing that I worked on was making it so that the time tracking feature actually worked, although there are currently no security checks to make sure that the time recorded is legitimate, which can be added with GPS functionality later. This data is stored in Firebase immediately so it is consistent and updates every time a log is stored for consistency. Also fixed issues with the login system because for example the code would allow for multiple people to use the same email to sign in.

Also reorganized some of the data structures to work with Firestore (No nested arrays for ex, that was causing errors) and nighttime and daytime hours are stored separately since that is a requirement.

After adding a feature to export the data as the PDF format that Michigan state accepts for drivers, then basically all of the features of RoadReady will be implemented, the only things left are to fix backend errors and finish the design. However, I have many more plans to implement things such as being able to sync data with multiple phones to allow for more convenience, as well as being as able to import data from RoadReady into this new app to allow for easier migration.

Devlog 1

I’ve begun development of my RoadReady Michigan app. My ultimate plan for this is to turn this into a React Native application, but I don’t know React nor do I know React Native so for the first week of Lock In I’m going to be making this as a PWA.

I started out by making a bare-bones starting application with ZERO styling and pure functionality, beginning with the authentication system and database with Firebase. I have zero experience with backend so I messed around with a lot of stuff like Auth0 and Clerk but I think that this works the best because it doesn’t redirect you anywhere + it is easy.

After messing around with backend stuff I laid out some basic features for account management and creating profiles for their kids, since the parents are supposed to register for their kids.

I started work with the logging bit as well!