How Graphical User Interfaces represent the beauty of the code
Coding is basically a passion at this point. Learning languages, tools, and advancing in the world of technologies is the main goal for most, if not all, developers. Coding in my opinion is like writing a life story, just like writing this article, a bunch of words combined to serve a purpose, and this purpose could live on for ages or die young.
And now you may be wondering. Zin, what are you even talking about? What is the “purpose” of this article? Simply, to answer you, I’m not talking about anything specific, rather I’m more trying to englobe all the different aspects of coding into a general one, and that’s what I was talking about at the end of the previous paragraph.
Now I know many of you, who aren’t familiar with coding or programming in general, think it is only a huge chunk of instructions thrown left and right inside our computers.
Now that’s partially right. But it’s literally not just that. You see, those lines are basically the magic behind all these beautiful visuals, interactions, designs, audios, videos, etc. Coding is literally what you pay as a programmer in order to create such beauty, which what we call “Graphical User Interfaces” or simply GUI.
GUI is basically the intermediate interface between the program and the user. It simplifies our life, makes managing and controlling the application’s features a lot easier and practical. However, that’s not all. GUIs are specifically made to seek the attention of the user. All those sophisticated designs, that one little button that changes its behavior when you click on it, those interactive checkboxes, those lovely animations, those satisfying audio indicators, etc, all together are meant to serve your joy and happiness. Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Simple examples: Discord, Facebook, Instagram, all social media apps, Spotify, Notion, Among us, and many other countless apps have GUIs.
Beautiful, isn’t it? Of course, coding isn’t enough to create those masterpieces. You need to link the logic with those designs. Therefore, “creativity is key” to everything. I’m not saying that I’m a talented person. There is a huge difference between creativity and talent.
Now, I’m going to showcase some of my efforts trying to create relevant GUIs.
First of all, a mobile app called “Miwok”, I was learning Java for app development 2 years ago, and Udacity had this final project on their Java course. Its purpose was to save a language called “Miwok” from extinction. It had all the basic communication skills, all you had to do is to press somewhere on the app to hear beautiful audio of how to spell the corresponding word correctly as well as its translation to English. Sadly, I lost the source code and all the files since my old pc was broken. Thus, Github became my savior later on.
Second of all, a project that I did in collaboration with my friend. We called it “Maze”. We made it using the C programming language and SDL2 to create the GUI. It’s a desktop application that gives you the ability to create randomly generated mazes, find two different paths from one entrance to two different exits.
Link to the repo: https://github.com/ZynoZin/Maze
Finally, the project I made recently. I call it “Crew Tracker”, an amazing tool that stays with you while playing Among us. It encourages you to become more competitive by tracking people and placing their positions on the map during meetings, collect information, and writing the necessary points on the notes area so you can bring them up in the next meetings in order to find out the imposter, and become a more efficient crew member. If you are an Among us player, go ahead and try it, I would love to hear what you think about it. You can download it from this GitHub link.
Here is the link to the repo: https://github.com/ZynoZin/CrewTracker
Well, that’s it for this article, I hope you learned more about the necessity of GUIs in our apps, and I encourage you to make beautiful and helpful apps in the future! Happy coding.
Zyno.
