StudyBuddy — Pomodoro, Flashcards & Quiz in One Beautiful App 🦉

Ujjwal Gupta — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:43:31 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

StudyBuddy is a browser-based productivity + learning app I built for my friend — a college student who was juggling exam prep across three different tools: a phone timer for Pomodoro, a notes app for flashcards, and a Google Form quiz a teacher shared. Every session, they'd context-switch between apps, lose focus, and end up doomscrolling between switches.

StudyBuddy collapses all three into one beautiful, distraction-free dark-mode app that lives entirely in the browser — no login, no account, no backend.

Features

⏱️ Pomodoro Timer

Animated circular ring timer with a gradient stroke that depletes in real time
Three modes: Focus, Short Break, Long Break — fully configurable
Session dot tracker (dots turn green as sessions complete)
Sound alerts via the Web Audio API — no external files
Auto-start next session toggle
Keyboard shortcuts: Space to start/pause, R to reset

🃏 Flashcards

Create cards with a question (front) and answer (back)
Silky smooth 3D flip animation on click or Space
Navigate with arrow buttons or ← → keys
Optional deck/tag label per card
After flipping: rate each card as Hard / OK / Easy for self-paced spaced repetition
Full card list with per-card delete; all data persists via localStorage

🧠 Quiz Mode

Build custom multiple-choice questions (up to 4 options each)
Mark the correct answer with a ✓ toggle right in the builder
Per-question countdown timer (configurable 5–300 s) with urgent pulsing at ≤5 s
Shuffle toggle for randomised question order
Live score counter during the quiz
Results screen: animated progress bar, score %, emoji feedback, and a full per-question review showing what you got wrong and what the right answer was

Who it's for

Friends who were burning hours every week just managing study tools. Now they open one tab, set a 25-minute Pomodoro, reviews flashcards during the break, and takes a self-quiz at the end. Zero friction, zero context switching.

Demo

🔗 Live Demo: ujjwalgupta2021.github.io/StudyBuddy/

To run locally: clone the repo and open index.html directly in your browser — no build step, no npm install, no server required.

git clone https://github.com/ujjwalgupta2021/StudyBuddy.git
cd StudyBuddy
# Open index.html in your browser
start index.html        # Windows
open index.html         # macOS
xdg-open index.html     # Linux

Code

🔗 GitHub Repository: github.com/ujjwalgupta2021/StudyBuddy

The project is vanilla HTML + CSS + JS — three files, zero dependencies, zero build tooling.

File	Role
`index.html`	Semantic structure, ARIA labels, all three tab panels
`style.css`	Dark glassmorphism design system — custom tokens, animations, responsive grid
`app.js`	All logic: timer engine, flashcard state, quiz engine, localStorage persistence

Architecture

graph TD
    A["index.html\nStructure + ARIA"] --> B["app.js\nAll Logic"]
    B --> C["Pomodoro Engine\nsetInterval + Web Audio"]
    B --> D["Flashcard Manager\nlocalStorage CRUD"]
    B --> E["Quiz Engine\nTimer + Scoring"]
    A --> F["style.css\nDesign System"]
    F --> G["CSS Custom Properties\nDark theme tokens"]
    F --> H["CSS Grid Layouts\nPomodoro · FC · Quiz"]
    B --> I["localStorage\nPersists sessions, cards, score"]

Highlights worth looking at

Circular timer ring — pure SVG with a stroke-dashoffset that ticks down in sync with setInterval:

const CIRCUMFERENCE = 2 * Math.PI * 98; // 615.75px
function updateRing(fraction) {
  const offset = CIRCUMFERENCE * (1 - fraction);
  document.getElementById('ring-fill').style.strokeDashoffset = offset;
}

3D card flip — CSS perspective + rotateY with backface-visibility: hidden, zero JS for the animation:

.fc-inner {
  transform-style: preserve-3d;
  transition: transform 0.55s cubic-bezier(.4, 0, .2, 1);
}
.fc-inner.flipped { transform: rotateY(180deg); }

Sound alerts with no audio files — Web Audio API oscillator, generated on the fly:

function playBeep(freq = 800, vol = 0.3, dur = 0.3) {
  const osc = audioCtx.createOscillator();
  const gain = audioCtx.createGain();
  osc.connect(gain);
  gain.connect(audioCtx.destination);
  osc.frequency.value = freq;
  gain.gain.exponentialRampToValueAtTime(0.001, audioCtx.currentTime + dur);
  osc.start();
  osc.stop(audioCtx.currentTime + dur);
}

How I Built It

I built StudyBuddy with Antigravity IDE — an open agentic coding assistant powered by Google DeepMind's Gemini models. The entire session was a dialogue: I described features, the agent scaffolded the HTML, generated the CSS design system, wrote the JavaScript logic modules, and I reviewed and iterated in real time.

The workflow was:

Described the three feature areas — the agent planned the tab structure and data model
Design pass — prompted for a dark glassmorphism aesthetic; the agent authored the full CSS custom-property token system
Feature implementation — timer engine, flashcard CRUD, quiz state machine — all built iteratively with me reviewing and adjusting
Polish — fixed layout gaps (the Pomodoro right-side empty space issue), resolved CSS linter warnings (appearance vendor prefix compatibility), tuned responsive breakpoints

The agent also caught and fixed a real CSS issue mid-session: -moz-appearance: textfield without the standard appearance: textfield companion — a cross-browser compatibility gap that linters flag.

Open-source AI stack:

🤖 Antigravity IDE — agentic coding assistant (Google DeepMind / Gemini)
🌐 Google Fonts (Outfit typeface) — the only external resource
🔊 Web Audio API — browser-native, no library

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

StudyBuddy is intentionally dependency-free. No React, no bundler, no CDN-hosted UI kit. That was only possible because an open AI agent understood my constraints ("pure HTML/CSS/JS, runs by opening a file") and worked within them — rather than defaulting to whatever popular framework its training data skewed toward.

A closed, black-box API can generate code, but it can't be audited, customised, or run offline. With an open-weight model:

No data leaves the machine — flashcard content and study patterns stay private
No account walls — the app works offline, on any device, forever
No forced upgrades — the code I ship today still works in ten years, no deprecated API keys

Open innovation made it possible to build a tool that is genuinely for a person, not a product for a company. That difference matters when you're building for a friend rather than for a market.

My Agent Session

The full pair-programming session with the Antigravity agent — including the design decisions, the Pomodoro layout fix, and the CSS compatibility conversation — was conducted live in the IDE. Key moments:

Chose stroke-dashoffset SVG ring over <canvas> for better CSS composability
Debated max-width constraints vs. CSS Grid for the Pomodoro layout (Grid won — no empty right-side space)
The agent proactively flagged the -moz-appearance / appearance cross-browser issue without being asked

Prize Categories

🏆 Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge — Build for a Friend
🌐 Open Source — zero-dependency, MIT-licensed, pure web standards
🎨 Best Design / UI — dark glassmorphism, micro-animations, 3D card flip, animated ring timer

Built with ❤️ for anyone who wants to ace their exams.

DEV Community: Ujjwal Gupta