Tutorial Progress

Even though, we had missing group members almost everyday of the week we still made quite a bit of progress. Starting Monday, I began skimming through all the tutorials, determining which one would serve my best interest. I discovered one website which had step-by-step instructions on how to make a "name-getter" app where the user would be asked for their name and I'm guessing the app would save the input, yes a very simply app. But this is only to build a foundation for our further apps, because we barely know anything about app development as of now. By Wednesday there was this nasty error which probably came from skipping parts of the tutorial, and by the time the app should have been finished, my code had some seriously weird errors from the "id's" I named the different sections of the app. I would have attempted to resolve those on Friday, but since I wasn't there, it'll have to wait until next week. However, my teammates have found another tutorial website which I'll be looking more into in the upcoming week.

The Day of Revision

Today was the first time we completed the code review. This is a review where you and a partner exchange codes and attempt to explain the code to one another. My review partner, Stephen Ngo, was working with C# with the XNA 4.0 Mainframe on Visual Studio and accomplished a couple of tutorials and began working on his longer-term project. I made a couple of suggestions such as changing the icons, clearing up the screen a little, and making sure more than one bullet can stay on the screen at one particular instance. Next week I'll be beginning a few more tutorials/ example apps to get an idea of what I'm capable of achieving in Android app development. I have an android myself which means that I can test the app on my phone in addition to the app simulator on the computer.

 

3,2,1...Preparing for Development

Last week in independent study was quite an adventure. On Monday, we started to make progress since we had our teacher download the SDK and othe other developer tools we needed. We've been downloading all the required files to begin developing an android app. Downloading all of these files took such a long time mainly because we were unaware of how the entire process worked, and the trick was that student accounts didn't have permission to download the necessary files. That had us stuck for a while since it simply said it wasn't downloadable instead of stating we didn't have the permission. Finally, after downloading the files from an Admin account, on Friday we made our first hint of progress. We researched various resources to find out how we would go about doing the project. We're probably going to make our first app an example app and see what all designer tools we have in hand. Then we feel a bit more confident, we'll go about making our unique app.

Beginning of the End...

Independent study class is very closely associated with the advanced programming class which means we'll have to do many similar tasks. The grading method we all came up with was reasonable and resemble's past year's rubrics so there's not much of a difference. Most of what we're graded on is what we choose to do independently or in groups. The project we choose is mostly going to carry on throughout the semester. What we're planning on doing right now is Android App development. Now this could change any time, but for now, it's what we're attempting to do. The hard part of the development is gathering all the resources and  equipment needed to start the actual coding. Downloading SDK, eclipse, add-ons, have taken up most of our time for now, but by the end of this week we should get a feel of how things should turn out.