As usual I haven’t quite followed the plan I outlined in the previous post, and went ahead and got this new blog set up before working on the Grade Calculator. Nothing fancy, but it should serve its purpose as a place to jot down thoughts and notes while working on Gizmoa.

I also made some small tweaks to the Poster Maker now that I have a couple of tablets to test on. I noted that text was a little hard to read on smaller screens, so I bumped up the font size a bit and picked a less bold description font. I also improved the Poster Maker layout such that the app remains centered, and looks OK on narrow tablets.

With all that out of the way, I will now actually begin work on the Grade Calculator. I made that app as more of a test run, so I’m considering doing a substantial redesign in addition to adding mobile support. It’s a much simpler app than the Poster Maker, so my goal is to get that shipped by September.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I expected mobile support to be a huge amount of work, and, for that reason, I was going to put it off. After a short experiment though, I came to realize it was not nearly as bad as I expected, so I decided to go ahead and make the Poster Maker support mobile.

Though I’ve done my best to ensure the app works on modern desktops and mobile browsers, mobile in particular can be a bit quirky. For example, iOS doesn’t seem to have a way to download PDF client-side, while Android has no ability in Chrome to display PDFs. I removed the Save as PDF button on mobile in favor of a button that will attempt to do what is supported on your device. Even so, some quirks remain. On iOS I was able to print perfectly, but on my old Android device, it seems to be impossible to print at 100% scale, so the printed poster is very slightly smaller than the specified size. Unfortunately, there’s really no way to work around problems like that.

In addition to mobile support, I also fixed a few issues, the most notable of which was due to EXIF orientation data in the image not being respected, causing PDF images to have the wrong aspect ratio.

Next up, I’d like to update the Grade Calculator to work on mobile. After that I might take a detour and update this “blog” to be, uh, an actual blog, with comments and categories. Finally, work will begin on the big Schedule Maker update, which I now plan to ship with mobile support.

After quite a few weekends of work, I’m happy to announce a brand new Gizmoa tool! The new Poster Maker allows you to print large posters at home, by splitting the poster into smaller pieces that you can print on an ordinary printer. After printing, you can cut out each poster segment, then glue them all together and place the result on your wall. In addition to posters, the tool supports banners, and will try to minimize paper use when printing long, thin images.

I think this is a great companion app to the College Schedule Maker, as you can now print your schedules on multiple sheets. In a future update, I wish to update the Schedule Maker such that it can produce vector graphics, which would mean you could print a crisp poster, no matter the size of your schedule. For now, there will be a bit of blurriness when the schedule is blown up, but I still think it’s a big improvement in legibility.

My next goal is an update to the College Schedule Maker, which I hope (but can’t promise) will be done early 2023. In addition to improving rendering, I would like to add additional export options and image formats.

Finally, a note about mobile support. I have to admit this may end up taking a backseat for a while. I’d love to support it, but it adds a massive amount of work that I’d rather spend creating new tools and improving existing ones. Unfortunately, Gizmoa remains a side project right now, so the time I have to work on it is extremely limited!

I hope you all enjoy the new tool, and don’t hesitate to reach out with any feedback.