A few weeks ago I was feeling unproductive, and for me the best way to quash that feeling is to hammer out a small project from start to finish. A few people were talking about needing a solution to manage large amounts of inventory + some other features like collaborative editing and checking in and out their stuff. I've wanted to make this for a while but now was the time to hammer out it. So I spun up a quick Ionic project and started to learn how to use the new Firestore tech (a vast improvement over the old Realtime Database IMO) and got to work.
My idea was to make it so you use or create "mixins" to categorize your lists of items, using sets of fields to define your list. So, if you want to have a list of MTG trading cards for sale, you'd pick "Magic the Gathering" "for sale". If you wanted to have a check in/check out system for video games, you'd pick "Video Games" "Library". Of course, you can make your own mixins as well - there's no way to cover every possible need.
You can see the end result here, but since that's just the app (I haven't gotten time to make a "proper" site for it), here's some examples:
As well, here are some pics of the tool in action.
What do you think?
Top comments (8)
Hey Kyle, this is really cool.
It definitely took me a few seconds to understand the "mix-ins" concepts. It seems like it basically allows you to quickly add a few pre-defined columns, right? And in some cases, those new columns have some corresponding functionality — IE checking something in and out of circulation.
At first the MTG (Magic the Gathering) example made me think that you'd be pre-filling rows. That could also be pretty cool... for instance, if you wanted to create your own recipe book but also wanted it back-filled from the start.
Hey Peter. You're exactly right, it just adds columns and sometimes that have functionality. I'm not sure what you mean, though, by pre-filling rows. In the case of MTG, for example, would you mean that it would pre-fill all of the card information for every card, and you'd just edit quantities and such?
If so, that would be pretty cool, but it would get taxing very quickly with all the other card games out there! I am wondering how it would apply to recipes?
Thanks for reading and checking it out all the same!
Yes, agreed that this would be really taxing. I think that your initial approach is definitely the right one. But having ready-made "libraries" to mix-in could be a cool eventual and/or crowd-sourced feature.
For instance, I could "mix in" the top 100 movies as rated by IMDB. And then leave my own notes and ratings using Inveinta. I could imagine that as a reasonable use case. :)
That does sound like a great feature! I'll need to get more users first before I can figure out what pre-made lists would be useful!
Pretty solid! I like the mixins idea. Also love the material design. I couldn't do things like delete a collection (permissions issue), and edit an item's description, but nothing crazy. :)
What are your thoughts on using Netlify as a host, compared to say Heroku?
Oops! I see now that I didn't test deleting anything - I added the firebase rules after everything worked.
Well, netlify is frontend only, whereas heroku could host your API (if you needed one). I was ok with heroku for a while, but I moved off of it in favor of hosting myself (w/ Dokku). I've never hosted the actual web app there too - always somewhere separate like github pages or netlify.
That said, though, I really like netlify! Their service is top notch - it has a whole host of features that I don't use now, but want to someday. Probably my favorite feature is live previewing of deploys when you make a pull request.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
There's some good game recommendations here too. I'll have to check out Jungle Speed!
Thanks! I haven't found the time to properly fill in all of my specific reviews, but Jungle Speed is one of my favorite games ever.