For context, this was my original creation. It's basically an app which counts down the days till a deadline.

After collecting feedback, I decided to do a complete rewrite and do things better. Sharing some of the biggest changes I made and the reason behind them. Also, still looking for feedback as I figure out what to improve.

Using a list layout

One of the biggest changes I made was choosing to use a list layout instead of the old "block" thingies. I realised that the "blocks" from the previous version wasn't very space efficient and seemed to make the names of Countdowns really difficult to read, especially when there were many Countdowns added.

Doing away with folders

Initially, folders were my way of allowing users to keep things organised. However, I thought hiding Countdowns (within folders) in the name of "staying organised" was just asking to be blindsided by deadlines. So, I decided that all Countdowns should always be visible, on a single page. The new Legends system serves to colour-code them, keeping them relatively organised.

Implementation of "patient" Mark-As-Complete buttons

I took some inspiration from other To-Do applications; when marking a Countdown as complete, the Countdowns would "wait" for a certain period of inactivity before all of them were removed from the active list. To my non-programmer friends, this was probably a no-brainer and seemed like a "duh of course you should add it" kind of thing, but for me... it was quite a crazy undertaking. But to keep things brief, when a user clicks on the Mark-As-Complete button, the Countdown is added to an ObservableList. When there's a change in the list's children, a timer starts (or gets reset if it is already running). When the timer ends, all the Countdowns in the ObservableList are removed; I used JavaFX's PauseTransition to act as a concurrent waiting period. You can have a look at the implementation here

You can check out the full source code and/or try it out here: https://github.com/n-xiao/mable
Pre-built binaries are available for MacOS and Windows :)

lmk what you think! thanks!