My Websites
I initially set out to learn mobile development but I also considered web development. Both have similarities; they run on multiple devices, it's easy to create your own product and are user event driven. So I thought to give this a try.
Using the skills I've learnt at university, I ended up creating a website. It looked more like an app, which showed I was more interested in creating web applications compared to more static pages with just links (kind of like this one). I found it much harder to get any sort of attention when trying a website which might mean there is just much more competition out there compared to mobile. For now, I still prefer mobile development but web development being much more popular and still very useful might still be a consideration for me.
Play The Key
Play The Key is a website which helps pianists sightread by displaying notes on the staff as they play them.
This website came about from my pianist hobbies. As a child, I used to have a keyboard which would display notes as I played them. I remember just tapping random keys just to see what note they were. I think it helped me with my sightreading and thought it might help others too. They can play around with the keyboard to try to find the note they are looking for.
This website was my first foray into web development. I found I preferred working with JavaScript and disliked CSS. This was one of my first personal projects after a semester in university learning programming which shows how much I've progressed since self-studying. I needed to learn a library which displayed notes on the staff as well as another library which could handle playing the sounds.
I had a few issues with this site. My first rendition worked perfectly offline but every time a user pressed a key online they would download the file as the key was pressed causing a delayed sound response. This meant I had to preload some sounds. But I also had issues preloading sounds as I found browsers don't like you downloading things until it is needed. I somehow managed to get around it and also minimised the sound file sizes. With the preload, it also meant displaying a spinning indicator to show the download was in progress. I strived to get very sound accurate recordings for the keyboard. Using my knowledge, I also had to consider what range of notes I should provide my users. I selected a range which I thought was the most common in most music which should be suitable for most beginners.
Quite a lot of things were considered for the user experience but I eventually got the website to my acceptable standards. This was a great project which fuses my piano hobbies, music knowledge and programming.