Updating with Bootstrap 2
I wasn’t feeling well today thanks to a major head cold.
I hate it when that happens.
So, I spent the day at home. After downing a couple pots of coffee I mustered up some ambition and decided to update my projects with Bootstrap 2 from Twitter.
Besides the fact that they’ve added some pretty cool stuff I haven’t even started using, they’ve changed some things. I recommend reading through that document because there are some fairly significant changes.
Read MoreThe Supermarket API app
Image by .shock @ photoxpress
I recently started a small app – or at least the beginnings of an app that I may decide to add additional functionality to – and deployed it to my projects domain. It’s still pretty rough around the edges and I may or may not keep it and add to it. For now I’ve named it Django Supermarket.
The application uses an external API – the Supermarket API.
It’s not 100% fully featured. Right now it does a few things, but not everything you’d expect if it were a fully featured supermarket-cart-shopping-checkout kind of application.
For me, it fulfilled some curiosity behind using an external API, Bootstrap from Twitter and Django. For the most part I’d say that it turned out pretty well. I built it pretty quickly and I’d like to revisit it and do a few things differently, make a few things better and add a few things here and there to achieve some general improvements overall.
The application does the following:
- First it allows you select your location using either Zip Code or State and City.
- Then, you select the grocery store you would like to use.
- After you’ve chose your location and store, you can start shopping for items and add them to your basket.
Data Storage
Keep in mind, I don’t really save much data in this app. I do store the States. Every time a new user enters the app I call for a fresh list of States served up by the API and store those in the event a new one might be added. I also use this call to make sure the external API is live.
The only other thing I store is the user’s preferences ( location and store info ) and items added to the cart – unless the items are removed from the cart.
The things I’d like to be able to change:
Facelift
Yep. It needs to be prettier. I do, in fact, know this.
Location
Overall I’d like to provide more a much more rich location selection feature – maybe add some intelligent location detection or some kind of HTML 5 location awareness. However, one thing the API does not provide is Longitude / Latitude. It’s either Zip Code or State and City. I imagine I could build something to be more region aware, but it would be nice if the API was better tuned to provide something by Lat/Lon.
Better Product Shopping Selection
The “shopping” screen never really has anything to display unless the user actually searches for something.
Something that would really be nice from the API is a “Recommended Items” method. For example, if I could provide a keyword in my request and the response provides a list of recommended items, that would be a nice addition. This could be done when the user has selected their store and moves to the “shopping” screen.
If there was an API call like this, another parameter could potentially be the storeid. The response could either send “recommended” items or items “on sale.”
Autocomplete
That doesn’t work very well, does it? Seems kind of weird to me that it always returns the same chunk of data regardless of what the user enters.
Pricing
Seriously? I have to pay to get the prices of items? Since I don’t intend to pay just to work on an app that I really have no intention of selling – this is just for fun – I need to make up my own prices.
Checkout
I may build this – I may not. Probably not. Most likely I will have moved on to the next app that’s interested me.
If you’ve had a chance to use it, please let me know what you think.
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