gqTimer Reboot

[michaelcmelton]

All:

I'm looking to create a full-stack web app with companion iOS app for speedcubing. I had the idea of rebooting gqTimer and combining it with a social media type of atmosphere, I'm here to gauge interest and figure out how many would be interested before embarking on the project.

Thanks,

michaelcmelton

 

[michaelcmelton]

Feel free to comment suggestions, etc.

 

[pglewis]

Have you assembled a wish list of the features you'd like to include? I'm not a fan of native applications except where they're the only possible solution but I definitely could have some interest in working on a web based tool. I really haven't sat down and brainstormed on what I'd like to see however.

 

[pglewis]

I've been mulling over some ideas for a little while on a "scratch your own itch" project so I figured I should throw this out there. If there is a lot of overlap in ideas we might consider collaborating rather than have two independent things cooking in similar directions. General brainstorming so far:

• High level
  • Has all the tools I frequently use in one place
  • Web based, will work on any modern standards compliant browser on any device
  • Responsive, able to sanely and effectively utilize the screen real-estate available
  • It would be nice to have a "wigetized" layout that allows you to choose which tools are displayed, where, and their dimensions.
  • Off-line capability for anything that doesn't require a network connection in order to function
  • I'm a strong proponent of open source software and GPL compatible licenses

• Tools
  • Timer with all the expected options
  • Cube simulator (eg alg.cubing.net)
  • Various practice drills (cross, 2 sided PLL recog, letter pairs, etc.)
  • Plus a few things I haven't seen, such as a sharable database of letter pair images for bld

• Social, I haven't thought much about this but it does seem prudent to at least support text chat
  • People giving lessons
  • Distributed cubing group meetings
  • ??? other useful cases (sharable image pair database kinda falls under social)

I haven't been able to pursue it seriously yet but I'm about to. Feel free to PM or discuss further here if you think this might be a worthwhile collab.

 

[QuinnHyatt]

This is a phenomenal idea. I loved GQ Timer, personally, and would absolutely LOVE to see an app/website with save-able sessions and data analytics. I would love to see this developed!

 

[pglewis]

Michael and I have teamed up on this and we've been working towards a timer prototype. The initial release will probably be local storage only for sessions but a database and server-side session management is definitely on the wish list to eventually support. Data analytics with nice graphs and charts is on my radar when we get that far.

Also, we have a GitHub repository set-up but everything is still very early in the prototyping stage. I don't think we're ready to send people there yet but we'll eventually route everyone to GitHub issues for feature requests. Until then definitely bombard us here with things you'd like to see.

 

[Raumaan Kidwai]

Hey guys, do you have any updates on this project?

 

[pglewis]

We have a lot of the basic functionality for 3x3 prototyped: random state scramble, keyboard activated timing, localstorage session data, graphing via Chartist.

GitHub: https://github.com/michaelcmelton/speedcubing-timer/

 

[Raumaan Kidwai]

Impressive!

 

[michaelcmelton]

Thanks for the shown interest @Raumaan Kidwai. We are currently working through the prototyping phase. We will post periodic updates as we have time.

 

[brosif-smith]

Try this app on for size, it is in the direction you guys are wanting, it saves your times to a database and shows some analytics like your averages and whatnot. I'm going to add a feature that graphs your times so you can see how you have improved in a more visual sense. adding new features all the time, plus the social aspect is exactly where i'm headed. See you there OP https://speedcuber.azurewebsites.net/

I would also be extremely interested in collaborating. I need some more developers to work with that know what they're doing.