Today was spent finally implementing something I have been meaning to do for probably years now. Up until now, there just wasn’t a way to reorder your favourites – probably the only control you could have would be to add them in exactly the right order.
I kept flip-flopping between doing it directly on the favourites screen, or doing it in the settings screen. My opinion is that it would feel more natural to just take a stop on the main screen and drag it to the position you want it to be. That is, until you realise that some users have 10 or 20 favourites. It would be very difficult to organise it – especially if you want to drag something all the way from the one end to the other.
One other thing I have to think about was the potential of breaking the favourites screen to add this. You wouldn’t want to re-order favourites all the time. So I settled for the idea to do it in the settings screen. It also gave me the chance to quickly reorganise the settings screen a bit.
I had the plan to use chips (if you don’t know what they are, there is a screenshot below) and allow users to reorder using them. I’ve never used them before and I had haven’t used drag and drop in Flutter before either. It took a couple of hours due to a silly little issue which had me stumped (thank you Stackoverflow – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53585711/dragtarget-onwillaccept-and-onaccept-not-firing/53621273#comment94954839_53621273). At one point during the struggle, I was going to give up and use lists instead and maybe even “move up/down” buttons, rather than fancy drag and drop, but I wanted to have my chips! I persisted and got it to work.
It worked okay on the simulator, but it felt a little bit fiddly. I got it to work really well and then decided to test it on a real phone. I’m not happy. It is pretty awful. It’s difficult to get the chips to land where they should and the chips are much bigger on the real phone, which meant that each one was on its own line any way. This would not really help a user very much and probably frustrate them.
I’m going to do it over again – I’ll probably just use a list view with up and down buttons. It is unfortunate, because I liked the look of the chips in general, but it’s just not practical.
Back to the beginning for me now…