Monthly Archives: December 2012

End Of the Semester

For Jon and I this is the end of the road for undergrad.  This Android project was a great way to end it.  All three of us want to continue to work on the app after school ends, we still have plans for it.

 

I’ve learned quite a bit over the course of the semester, not just coding with Android but how to work with a team.   We all became pretty good at using git, although sometimes the project still hates me and doesn’t want to work but that’s ok.  We have hundreds and hundreds of emails over the past few months talking about the app.  We also took advantage of the library TVs and did a bit of code review at our (bi)-weekly meetings.  Of course, we all learned Java for Android quite a bit, too and attempting to use the GUI for XML.

 

This was a great experience and a great way to end my undergraduate degree.

 

 

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way,

 

James Celona

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Using 3rd Party Libraries

Task Butler uses two open source third party libraries: ActionBar Sherlock and AmbilWarna

ActionBarSherlock is an excellent library that emulates the Ice Cream Sandwich action bar in older versions of Android. This was crucial for our app because we were developing for 2.2+, and having to design an entirely different UI would have been inelegant and a massive amount of extra work. Jake Wharton’s ABS uses the same API calls as Android’s official library, so one can follow Google’s API specification to use his library. Google has its own support library with limited features available, but ABS is a much more complete solution. It was critical to the design of our UI and I thank him for developing it and releasing it for free.

The AmbilWarna color picker dialog is a neat piece of code that provides a color selector for users. We needed a way for users to pick colors for their categories and this seemed like a much nicer solution than giving users limited choices like other apps do. Picture attached.

ColorPicker_1

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Task Butler available on Google Play!

As of this writing, our summer/fall project Task Butler is available to be downloaded on the Google Play store! I am very proud of what we accomplished and I invite anyone with an Android device to check it out. Feedback is always appreciated, of course.

 

Grab it here.

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.