Project Goldstone

Goldstone is a study music timer built with the Pomodoro study method in mind. The app not only allows users to start a timer and keep track of their total focused time, but also allows user to pick a YouTube playlist of their choice to play as they get on with their productive tasks.

What was used?

The project makes use of create-react-app in order to organize and render the visual components, and the react-youtube api to provide the audio functionality of the program. The use of the api, allows for the creation of custom controls as can be seen in the project which are then used to manipulate the video playing in the background.

What was learnt?

Goldstone was my first ever app built with React. It allowed me to better understand the nitty gritty bits of and opened the gateway for many more React projects to come. It was also something, that I had initially made for myself, as I needed a pomodoro app but none of the pre-existing ones let you play music, and even if they did you did not have the freedom to choose what was played.

What could be improved?

Project Goldstone was built before I had learnt Redux, thinking back now, I think the state management of the app could have been a lot more efficient and the code would become a lot more simplified (well arguably given that Redux itself be quite clunky), as the app is built on a wide network of state transfers between parent and child components, which could have been avoided with the use of state manager like Redux.
Another aspect I would like to improve, perhaps in a future update, would be to make the web app more responsive because as of right now the app is only configured (visually speaking) to work on desktop devices.