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Built a simple Pokedex Glide app, learned a lesson

My son is a big fan of Pokémon and loves to talk about the details of all his Pokémon and their strengths, weaknesses, type matchups.

I spent a couple hours building a quick Pokédex app with Glide for him. It was very simple but fun and the end result was good enough for an MVP. I probably spent more time researching Pokémon and finding good data to load into the app than I did on the configuration.

When I shared it with my son, it was a huge hit. He loved it! Over the next couple of days, I watched as he showed it to everyone he could over Facetime and Zoom and on my phone.

He loved showing friends and cousins and grandparents that it was "his app" as evidenced by the fact that it said "___'s Pokédex App" on the home screen. He also completely edited almost every bit of verified, perfectly structured data I entered into the app. He took the most joy in modifying the descriptions to suit his perspective on each Pokémon. It was great to watch.

I learned (re-learned, really) two good lessons.

  1. Listen to your users and watch the way they use your product. It may not be what you intended, but you'll learn something.
  2. Focus most of your effort on the primary thing that your users care about and layer on one or two elements that provide immediate delight.
  1. 2

    It looks amazing. I could never have imagined such a thing. Very excited about the development of today's kids, it's very cool. I've been a Pokémon fan since I was a kid, I even did material about Pokemons for a service https://eduzaurus.com/free-essay-samples/pokemon/ with free essay samples for students where I detailed the universe. I think this cartoon will be popular even in my old age and more than one generation will grow up on it with their own interesting ideas of what else can be done with these characters)

  2. 2

    It's super cute! I'm a big fan of Pokemon and Nocode.

    It would be fantastic to extend our conversation. Are you on Twitter? Let's chat, my link is here: https://twitter.com/felix12777

  3. 2

    That's awesome! In building digital (and non-digital )things for my little guy, I too have discovered that they feel a great degree of pride and ownership in the end product.

    Maybe he can help you continue to refine it and roll out a v2 to a bigger audience. There are a lot of Pokémon-enamored kids out there, just sayin!

    1. 1

      That's very cool to hear that you have experienced the same. What a feeling!

      I forgot to mention that I have been teaching him how to write basic HTML, so this was a natural outgrowth of that work together. He has made multiple "websites" on his local machine and he gets so excited to link the pages together and show me what he built.

      I think his head is going to burst when we finally put some of his pages on a server and give his grandparents the URL so they can access it from their houses.

      I definitely have received some feature requests for the Pokédex app, so I think we'll continue building together.

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