Capstone Development

So working a lot on my bachelors thesis to get the next working version out by tomorrow. The Center for Student Success is having a Time Management workshop tomorrow and I'm going to pitch my project to them to see if there are interested in testing it. I'm really excited.

But what takes me to my blog is remembering that when you have a statement like:

• final_minutes = temp_minutes + current_minutes % 60

 you might actually be meaning

• final_minutes = (temp_minutes + current_minutes) % 60

Emphasis added to the parenthesis. Just another moment where you remember a skill learned long ago in a CST 101 course.

First Stackoverflow Answer

So working on my Capstone I had the problem of my app launching to the first screen when I clicked the launcher, after I had navigated away from the app. So after several failed stack overflow answers I turned to the activity documentation on the Android developers sight. And I found the android:alwaysRetainTaskState attribute. Which worked perfectly for me.

The bonus for this was I posted my solution to stackoverflow!!!!

Finally have the Android Development Bridge Working

After buying a used laptop with the primary intent to be able to have a separate workstation to do all my developing on, I was thrilled just now when I finally got the ADB to successfully deploy to my S3. I have had problems with this for the last two years using my mac and to finally see that little prompt asking me about an RSA key, made a small tear of joy sleek down my cheek.

So ready to tackle my bachelor's thesis dev now.

CPUC Tester

VICTORY IS MINE!!!

I just got over a huge hurtle for my work programming a standalone internet speed tester. Me and a co-worker have been sitting at the computer for three hours and we were finally able to get the tests to successfully run and print their output to the application window.

We have a situation where we have several objects communicating with each other and we were running into problems because we were having multiple instances of the same objects. First we tried to make everything static but we found the better solution was to pass the objects to each other through their constructors and then save the reference to them.

It feels so good to be over this hump and I know this project is going to wrap up nicely.

Using the APIs

So I actually just used the Android APIs to figure out how to get the y location of a touch event, as opposed to using a sketchy stack overflow answer. I'm totally starting to get over the Android learning curve.

Long Term Problem Solved

So, this may not be the least incriminating blog post ever, but I have to start by admitting that, about a year ago, I downloaded some software (for educational purposes I promise). And in order to do so I had to manually change a certain host file so that a certain program would loop back to itself when it went to the internet to check to see if it had been verified.

Needless to say this small change was just that, small, and I went to almost forget about it. A year later, and now that same software is available to me through my university at no cost at all. Unfortunately, I had had the longest and hardest problem of trying to figure out why I couldn't install it properly. I was sure that I was using the correct activation code, but the program kept spitting it out. I sent a couple emails, asked some friends, and even went to IT, but to no avail. Until....

Driving home today I had a flash of intuition, that of the file I had changed when installing the program the first time. Could this be the source of all of my frustration? I went to the depths of google, found out how to find the file I changed all those months ago, went to it and what comment do my eyes behold? "# verification blocker code " Ahhaaa, I said to myself. Commenting out the lines of following code I saved the file and raced to the activation screen for my software, inputted my code and finally.. viola! It accepted!

Now the software is installing and boy does it feel so good.

Bachelors thesis in progress

I got to meet with my client for my bachelors thesis project (or capstone project) today. I'm working with my university's Center for Student Success to develop a time management Android application.

The concept for the app is that students build a micro schedule (timeline) for themselves before they start working. The timeline could only be about an hour long, but during that time the student says, "I'm going to work on this assignment for 25 minutes, this assignment for 15 minutes and this assignment 20 minutes." The app lets them build the timeline and then prompts them to move on to the next take when their time runs out.

There are a lot of design things I'm really excited to implement with this project and I'm really hopefully that this style of working will work well for different types of students. The bulk of the capstone will be getting students to sign up to test the app through finals to see if it is useful for them.

I'm really excited to be in development and to start getting sign ups for testing.

First published app

So this was a huge week for me. I paid for my developers account on Thursday evening and Friday night I uploaded an apk to a rock paper scissors game I made. Within two hours it was on the play store Andi was texting my friends to download it. It has been so amazing to tell people about it, watch them search for it and see my name on the product and to see them download it play it and have fun.

I'm so excited, I can't wait to get more apps on the market!

Android Club is the BOSS

Android club has been going great. Two weeks ago we split up into small groups to develop Halloween themed apps. So far we have an augmented reality app that paints ghosts onto the camera, a spooky doors guessing game app, and a haunted guess-my-number app.

We're all really excited to be making progress and working with the graphic design majors. Hopefully we'll be able to open up a google developers account to publish the apps before Halloween!

Sprite Handling

We are working on sprite handling in game programming. It's pretty exciting. The last few weeks we've been learning about double screen buffering, animations and collision detection. I'm working on the first project for the course now, which is a scaled down invaders game, and it's so much fun.

Can't wait for PACMAN!