I wanted to share my current status of what I am working on. The last weeks have been quite busy getting ready to implement dark mode.
Initially I thought, hey, thats not going to be a big deal, but boy was I wrong.
Migrating to androidx
FocusGTD is already quite an old app with the code base going back to 2014. While I have been mostly keeping up with the times (and Omnis new feature introductions) I haven't kept the UI code entirely up to date, by still relying on some now deprecated features and UI components.
So when I initially tried to introduce dark mode to the app many things did not work properly since the UI components I was using simply werent prepared to support this.
In addition, Google now basically forces all apps to migrate to androidx (their) new way of doing android applications, and many of the new libraries now require androidx.
The problem with that is that it is a ton of work without any user benefit. I mean the app looks and feels just like before, however, I have been spending countless hours to even get the app to compile again, let alone work.
Maybe Jetpack Compose?
Finally, Google again changes their way to implement android ui by recommending Jetpack Compose. I thought maybe, I could skip the whole androidx step and go straight to jetpack compose, right?
Well not so fast, first Jetpack Compose just turned alpha (after a whole year in pre-alpha state). So its not really known how long it would be until it turns production quality.
Second, many features that the app uses simply don't exist yet in Jetpack Compose (such as the nifty tag selector widget)
I would have to re-invent those widgets and get them production grade before I could release FocusGTD with Compose.
Third, IMHO jetpack compose does not have a better approach for building separate UI logic for tablet UIs (which developers more and more seem to ignore). So making the app work reasonable on tablets would also have taken quite some time to get back to what it currently is.
So after my initial enthusiasm for Jetpack Compose and weighing pros and cons I decided to do the migration to androidx (and adding dark mode so that users at least get a bit of value) and not do jump onto the Compose bandwagon yet.
I might start to migrate a few of the simpler screens to compose once the time is right but now that the app is reasonably up to date now, its not that pressing anymore.
So how does it look in dark mode?
Here are some screenshots of the app in dark mode.
When will it be ready?
Well thats a good question. I have a few more things to clean up so it will probably take another week or so.