I spent this week tidying up a few odds and ends in my rafter creation app as well as drawing diagrams and creating icons.  I have done a bit of coding, as well as correcting a bug I discovered with gambrel and mansard fascia calculations.  There will be more coding needed before I can publish still, but not too much, the rafter instructions are not yet housed independently in their respective classes.  That – and I still need to build in an options menu with an ‘about’ page and an option to quit the application.  I have honestly been debating whether it is entirely necessary, but have been leaning towards yes.  The reason being, I don’t want the user to become frustrated with clicking the back button repeatedly when they want to quit.  There is also an issue with the fascia options regarding what to do when the user selection will not allow for a standard fascia cut.  In the event of steep pitches and short fascia projections, it can become necessary to notch the birds mouth cut of the rafter above the top plate.  When this happens you need to lace the plywood or sheathing with the portion of the rafter that is notched out.  I show this situation in the picture below.  

The problem is the user may already have sheathed their building, in which case their needs to be some sort of warning to let the user know the affect of their choice.  There are a few ways I could handle this.  I could limit the user from making choices that create this situation.  The draw back here is it is not a bad practice to notch above the plate in order to accommodate the proper fascia size, and there is no reason not to apply it other than that it will require more work.  I could also choose to allow the situation to occur and just give the user a warning.  However, that would not be very helpful to the user and it would require disabling the creation instructions because they would be incorrect in such a situation.  The last and I think best scenario is to catch the situation and warn the user, giving them the option to re-enter new data or proceed.  In the event that they proceed the fascia activity will pass a message along to the output activity.  This message will let the output activity know what changes to make to the images and instruction in order to accommodate the new fascia cuts.  As a bonus to this approach, the app would be able to accommodate any fascia size in any circumstance.  The draw back would be that it will take the most time to implement and I am severely short on time.

I have completed some of my diagrams and icons this week so here are some pictures of the final product.  

My plan is to utilize top down views to show the necessary inputs for hips, unequal hips, mansards and sheds with hips, as my original 2D approach left to much to be assumed on the user end.  For instance you cannot show to different opposing pitches with a 2D diagram.  I will be working on those soon and will post some more pics when they are ready.  In addition to that I still need to draw all the instructional diagrams, which depict how cut up each rafter.  The textual instructions for cutting common rafters are complete but I still need to write instructions for cutting other more complex rafters.  I expect to finish all diagrams and textual instruction by the end of the week.  I will be working in order of what is most important.  Any instructional texts that don’t get done by the end of week will have to be part of the second version at this point.  That’s pretty much all thats left before I can publish so I had better get back to it.

Till next time.

Jason Hintlian

From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Well, It would seem another two weeks has flown by but with midterms this past week; I hardly noticed.  I honestly would have had nothing to post a week ago due to a test in Operating Systems which required a lot of preparation.  I also had to set up two other operating systems on my Mac Book Pro Retina MBPR for that class as well this past week and write a report on it.  That said I am going to try and post a tutorial for setting up Ubuntu and Windows 8.1 on a  MBPR using the Refind boot loader, I downloaded from GitHub.  Reason being it is not very straight forward and I could not find any clear instructions myself for setting up a triple boot system on a MBPR.

Anyway, once I finished all that I was in the clear to get some work done on my rafter app.  I decided I would tackle Gambrels and Mansards simultaneously due to there similarity in nature.  Simply put, a Mansard is a Gambrel with hips.  Considering all the mathematical logic I needed was already completed doing past roofs, it only took two days to implement everything else involved.  Although, I have to admit one of those days was severely inhibited due to a Saint Patricks Day work party my wife and I had to go to the night before.  In any event, all the roofs I will be offering in the first version are complete now and by that I mean the great majority of the code is completed.  I have neglected art work, diagrams and the instructions sets which is basically the content of the app, in an attempt to catch up on my tentative deadlines.  Unfortunately, I am not much of an artist and it tends to take me a long time to create icons and diagrams.  The plan now – regardless – is to complete all of that which I imagine will take a couple weeks at least.

This is not what I had hoped for, but the fact is it leaves four maybe five weeks to convert the app to iOS.  However, I am convinced that with layouts, instructions, icons, and themes finished in Android, the conversion will go smoothly.  There was really nothing I could cut from the first version, other than dormers, in order to expedite the process.  Dormers would have been a slightly different animal and they should have needed there own menu as well, so it made sense to cut them.  As a consolation for the loss of dormers from my original proposal though, the app now includes sheds roofs with hips, unequal hip roofs and mansard roofs.  I felt this was a rational and fair trade-off. 

In addition to the two new roof options I added this week, I also made some major updates regarding theming.  Android makes it very easy to customize the look and feel of your app.  You can create customized backgrounds for anything that supports a background; which is almost every UI component available.  In addition to that Android provides a style.xml file in your res/value folder where you can set themes for the entire app like text styles, menu styles, action bar style etc..  It took a little while to wrap my head around it at first, but now changing the theme of the app has become quite trivial.  I spent a good amount of time this week just playing with all the different options and trying to decide which themes best suited my app.  I will be working to finish my icons this week and diagrams so I can post some pictures of the app.  The instructions will more than likely be written before the instructional diagrams, but I will be able to post pics of the menu and input screens soon.

Till next time.

Jason Hintlian

From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.