Micro apps - Some Score Cards

In the spirit of maintaining a document of what I’ve been working on, and being somewhat inspired by Matt Birchler’s posts about his micro apps, I’d thought I’d document on some of the small apps I’ve worked on recently.

The fact of the matter is that I’ve been building quite a few of these apps over the course of the summer, primarily in response to a specific need I have at the time. I haven’t written about them before, mainly because there didn’t feel like there was much to say. Some were vibe coded, and saying that I “made” them didn’t feel correct. Others were made by hand, but they were super simple and there was no real challenge in making them at all. In either case, being able to say “I made it” is difficult as the amount of effort spent in making it is quite low, and that doesn’t make for interesting blog posts. Would a post saying that “I went to work today” be worth reading if that’s what I do every weekday?

But regardless of what my feelings are, the scales were tipped ever so slightly into wanting to write about them. So that’s what I’ll do. And there is some leeway in writing about the small things if I were to put them in the Devlog category, which could be seen as my public workbook.

So, let’s set expectations by talking about a series of score-keeping apps. These are among the simplest micro-apps I have, yet they do have their uses. You’re always left high and dry with a need to keep score of some ad-hoc game made in the moment (or, at least, I am). Notebooks and spreadsheets could work here, but I don’t carry a paper notebook, and use a digital notebook for this is always a little cumbersome. And a spreadsheet just feel a little overkill. Hence, the want for having a simple web-app for keeping scores:

Using it couldn’t be simpler: enter the score under the specific player, and it will be recorded in a table, alongside a running total. If you make a mistake, tap “Undo”. If you want to clear the scorecard, tap “Reset”. The scores are stored in local-storage so there’s nothing server side that’s running (although it does mean they’re tied to your browser). Focus automatically moves to the player to the right, but any entry could be entered at any time.

There’s a two player and four player variant. I was considering having a “player entry” screen to select the number of players, but that felt like adding too much complexity for something that’s designed to be quick to implement.

In fact, much of this was already implemented in the form of a Finska scorecard.

This is not a new project, I just moved it from a dedicated domain name and changed the styling. It’s been a while since I needed it for a game of Finska: I was more often than not using it for generic scorekeeping. But there were some aspects of scoring Finska which made it useful for that, and less useful for anything generic. For those who never played Finska, the goal is to get to exactly 50 points. If you go over 50, you go back to 25 points. There’s also a mode where all the zero point entries are highlighted to indicate a foul (3 fouls means you loose the game).

And, that’s it! Really, there’s nothing more to say about these apps. I had a need and some free time, so I put these together. There is one other scoring app that I’ve made, but that’s a little more complicated and warrants it’s own post.