drkdidel.be

Water Tracker

Here is the release of a small hydration tracker, made with Compose Multiplatform (CMP). It is a lightweight, high-performance utility app for Android and iOS.

The goal was to create a seamless, reactive experience while keeping the UI layer entirely decoupled from business logic: the "Dumb UI" pattern, or more professional sounding: Unidirectional Data Flow (UDF).

To ensure the UI remains a pure projection of the state, I moved all logical operations—including orientation-based grid calculations (rows/cols), date formatting, and accessibility strings—into the ViewModel. Even the layout math, like chunking the list of 8 glasses into rows, is handled in the ViewModel. This makes the Composables "dumb" and easy to preview, while the entire user experience becomes unit-testable without an emulator.

The app uses Room for local persistence, leveraging its new Kotlin Multiplatform capabilities. A database factory handles path differences between Android’s internal storage and iOS’s document directory through the expect/actual pattern. Koin ensures dependency injection.

To match the new requirement of Android SDK 36+, the UI is adaptive to ensure a pleasant experience both in portrait and lanscape modes. The glass shape is drawn using the Canvas API, and I played with a few simple animations to smooth the state changes.

I also experimented with custom semantic roles and state descriptions, to fully support screen readers like TalkBack and VoiceOver.

My Simple Account Manager

I built a small utility app with Jetpack Compose to keep my accounts and spending under control. The project served two main purposes:

• Compose practice – develop a fully functional UI using Jetpack Compose, including a LazyColumn, swipe gestures (left/right) for extra actions, and drag‑and‑drop reordering of rows.
• Architecture practice – implement a classic MVVM stack with all the usual layers of a traditional app: network calls, queries to a local Room database, and read/write access to the device’s file system.

Main features

• Create, edit, and delete accounts.
• Fetch currency rates from an API and automatically convert amounts to the selected currency.
• Support all current world currencies.
• Add or subtract amounts from an account balance.
• Import and export data in JSON format for easy backup and restore.

Hair Technique Pro

This is my very first official release of a personal Android app on Google Play, and it’s also my first project built entirely with Jetpack Compose.

I began my mobile development career using Java and XML layouts. After spending several years maintaining legacy code, it took some time to become proficient with Jetpack Compose and its recommended architecture and best practices.

With this initial app I was able to experiment with core Compose components, Material 3 theming, navigation patterns, state management, and play with simple animations.