Stephen:
There was a lot to do this week! I spent my time divided between designing our application with Figma, building our frontend with Electron, and preparing for the presentation.
Designing with Figma:
This is actually my first time designing anything! Although I have done some front end web development before, I have always worked with a designer who provided the assets and design of the product. From this experience, I’ve definitely grown more appreciative of the hard work they do!
There are a lot of design tools out there, but I settled on using Figma to help organize what our application will look like. Figma is an online UI design tool that allows for teams to work together without needing to pass around a messy amount of assets and images.
Although Figma was really helpful for our team, there definitely was an initial learning curve to using Figma. The application is really powerful and lets you do so many transformations to an image, for instance. However, the abundance of tools made even the simplest thing a bit contrived to do.
After a little trial and error, I came up with this design:
Building with Electron:
Building with Electron seems to be pretty straightforward because I can mainly proceed with Node.js development. However, scoping and testing things out this week definitely made me more aware of how many moving parts there are in the frontend. For example, to be most effective, the circuit simulator would ideally be able to snap circuit components together, allow the user to expand the canvas / scroll around to build large multi-screen circuits, and creatively organize wires with labels to make the circuit readable. The main takeaway from messing around with Electron this week is that I need to increase my pace of development of the frontend for this semester.
I began this week by making a simple “Hello World” application. I moved on to messing with some features such as a file manager and adding custom HTML.
This week, I hope to have a v1 of our application built and ready. I want to be able to click through circuit parts and move them onto my grid to build a circuit. I’ll save converting the circuit to a netlist for a later time.
With my current progress, I think that I am on track / a bit behind. I want to push a bit more on the front end progress before spring break, so for these next two weeks I’ll invest more time than before.