Low-code in a nutshell

Developing using Mendix

I’ve been trying and testing different low-code tools now for couple of years. My main goal has been to understand the competitive landscape to be able to guide development our own process orchestration tool. The best way to scope the requirements has been to try building the same training tracking app using different tools. It has been fun since at the same time I have been able to learn new skills myself. The key take-away from my experiences so far has been that there are limitations to all tools and either getting around them or accepting the compromises. The web-based Mendix Studio is a great tool, but certainly has its peculiarities.

Capturing team sports in 3d

I’ve been recording my son’s hockey games with a traditional camera on a tripod setup. To be honest it is bit tedious to keep panning back and forth. Behind the camera you miss the experience of watching key parts of the game. Also not all hockey rinks are created equal so the camera placement options vary. I’ve been playing around with and idea how to get around these issues. What I have found is that 3d cameras with two or more fisheye lenses are getting much more accessible. There are couple of technical hurdles that needs to be solved, but that just means there is room to innovate.

Making a highlight reel from Youtube videos

Many of my son’s hockey games have been recorded and published on Youtube. He has been pestering me to make a highlight reel of his season. The challenge is that using Youtube’s own tools you can only make playlists that have a starting point. There is no way to set the end point for the clip. Luckily I found a nifty Chrome browser extension Hashcut that has potential. I have not quite yet mastered it, but it looks promising and I hope the developers do put more effort into it.

AppSheet review

I recently created a small custom app for tracking hours in the outdoor ice-skating challenge using AppSheet. Now the time is up and the feedback from the beta test gathered. Overall the app accomplished what I set out to do. There were few niggles and I would like to point those out.

• The way I had set out the table in Google Sheets I could not figure out a way to calculate the number of times on ice. Consequently average session lenght was impossible to calculate.
• The chosen bar chart did not show the event in a time line, but just as horizontal bars. A stacked area diagram woud have been a better visualization of how the hours acrued, but no such thing was available.
• There was no way to set a diagonal line in the bar chart to show the current state of the moving goal.
• It was not possible to create a drop-down list in the application settings. I would have liked for the user to be able to select their goal (bronze, silver, gold) and track their performance against it.
• The AppSheet app had to be downloaded by the user and Google user account was required for login. Some users would have liked to have an offline version that can be downloaded from an AppStore (premium feature).
• To access table data AppSheet required rights to a Google Drive. Now in hindsight I would have setup a separate google account just for the app.

In general the app was easy to use and adding the hours was very simple. It was fun to see how many hours other users had accumulated and what is most important my son did reach the gold level in the challenge.