AtoZ Outdoors

What it does

You’re going somewhere outdoors. The app asks what activity, then details about the trip, and generates a packing checklist scoped to that specific situation — across 47 activities and roughly 380 gear items, with gear organized into tiers so you can see what’s essential versus what’s optional versus what’s genuinely nice to have.

Then it works when you have no signal, which is when you’re most likely to need it.

Why offline-first

This is the constraint that shaped everything. A packing app is used at the trailhead, in the campground, in the truck at 6 a.m. — places where connectivity is unreliable or absent. So there is no backend.

The app ships with a seeded SQLite database and does all its work locally. Checklists, activities, gear data, saved lists and preferences live on the device. Nothing is fetched, nothing is synced, no account is required, and no data leaves the phone. That also means there’s no server to run or pay for, which for a single-developer app is the difference between shipping and not.

Design decisions

Gear tiers instead of flat lists. A list of 60 items is useless. Tiering it by necessity means a beginner can pack the essentials and an experienced user can scan for what they’ve forgotten — the same list serving both.

Trip details drive the output. The checklist is a function of the activity plus the specifics, rather than a static template per activity.

Twelve in-app help articles, written as content and bundled as markdown assets — covering how the smart checklists work, understanding gear tiers, printing, offline behavior and privacy. Old habits from documentation work: if a feature needs explaining, explain it in place.

PDF export and printing, because plenty of people want the checklist on paper in a pocket rather than on a phone they’re trying to preserve battery on.

Structure

Flutter targeting both iOS and Android from one codebase, with Provider for state across activities, checklists, trips and preferences. Seven screens, a responsive theme layer handling phone and tablet sizing, and platform icon and splash configuration done for both stores.

Status: built and running on both platforms, not yet published to the app stores. The repository includes a widget test and an internal skill note documenting the data model’s sharp edges for future work.