The state & future of Overmorrow

[bmaroti9]

You might have noticed that the updates and work on Overmorrow, have basically stopped since march. After nearly 3 years of working on this app, i had completely burnt out. I basically got the app to what i would say 90% complete, with no major features missing, and there was just nothing really interesting to do anymore. I was tired of making the same app for so long, and working with the same codebase, that i basically wrote at 14. And most of all i had enough of Flutter.

I basically never got to use the full potential of Flutter, only ever making an android version. To publish on the app store would've cost a lot of money, and i was also too invested in material design at this point. The web and desktop versions very slow and laggy in my experience. The filesizes were huge, and the app itself was slow, and updates, i was waiting for, like material 3 expressive just never came.

But the thing i hated the most was the fact that the app broke every two weeks with some kind of new version, where i would have to search around with useless error messages, and endless version conflicts for hours. Heck I'm writing this currently in the middle of a 3 hour long session of troubleshooting jdk versions, even though i never touched a single line of code, and it compiled perfectly like a week ago.

So i had enough and decided to learn a language i had already been interested in: Kotlin. Around 3 months ago i started work on my first compose app, Citole, which was a local music playing app. I won't say that Compose is flawless, but after getting the hang of it, it felt so much simpler, faster, smaller, and it actually had a lot of things i had custom built so many years ago in dart, just already implemented.

I really enjoyed making Citole, and it was the first time in a while, when just building seemed fun, and motivating again, something that i haven't felt with Overmorrow since last year. So that's when i decided to rewrite Overmorrow from scratch in Compose.

Now some people might say that this is a stupid thing to do, and it might be to just completely abandon a perfectly working app's code, and just rewrite it from the ground up in a completely different language, and they might be right. But for me this felt like a breath of fresh air, to completely leave the stupid old practices and mistakes, i wrote so long ago, on which the whole app depended on, was wonderful. It's also a really great learning opportunity, I haven't really moved out of my comfort zone like this since first starting with Flutter or learning C++ in 8th.

I've been working on the compose rewrite for almost a month now, and it's actually progressing faster than i had expected. The new version will solve so many things that were dragging the flutter version behind. Stuff like null safety on every field, totally separated searching, weather and image apis, easy support for adding new data sources, converted data caching, and a brand new weather provider comparing page, just to name a few. Also i'm doing a complete redo of the whole ui, for material 3 expressive, and also to be more weather centered, and not just pretty)

This is why v2.6.4 is the last planned flutter version.

After that, the next version will be v4.0 in pure kotlin (if you're asking what happened to v3... looking back v2.5 and 2.6 should have been v3 because i basically almost rewrote the whole state and data logic in v2.5 and did a complete ui overhaul, and v2.6 brought widgets and notifications, so they are spiritually v3).

So yeah, hopefully you forgive me for not being to active here in the last 6 months, and yeah, i'll keep working on the compose rewrite, which i hope i will have a beta for in a few weeks, and the actual full release in a few months, if the start of school doesn't slow me down too much.

[zwrmueller]

Thanx very much for sharing your thoughts, that's very personal and makes the flavor of open source.

I say thank you for your commitment to this app and your inner fights going the right way.

I will follow you to your new baby and which you luck and much pleasure with it.

Hang on going your way, brother!