jbv's blog

The application is finally done. We had a final meeting to share all results that we have accumulated. The nutritional team shared the information from the user surveys, and we discussed improvements to the application that could be considered for future works.

Overall, the application seems to have been well received. There are still a few bugs, but as it was a prototype, the users were comfortable with this.

Since the previous wave of updates, updates have continued to be made for the app. Many of the categories generated by the automatic parser have been combined into more human-friendly categories. Using a web interface that I created, recommendations were input into the database by the nutritional team and show up in the application without actual updates to the application on the phone.

Here is a link to the promised application pictures!

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~jbv/ftpics/

The application also had many usability tweaks as well. Any long operations were moved such that they work in the background while the user can navigate other portions of the application.

The layout for each page is now generated using the same methods for each screen, so that the layout is uniform between different screens. Uniform styles were also applied to each page of the application, to improve the appearance.

Minor tweaks were made as my understanding of Android increased -- layout optimizations that make the page load faster for the user were quite welcome.

The structure of the application was also greatly retooled to allow for different use cases. Our team decided that in order to better accommodate different types of requests, we should allow for different entrypoints into a restaurant menu -- for example, if a user wants to find restaurants with hamburgers, he should be able to look that up rather than having to guess a restaurant name.

The blog may have been a little neglected these past few weeks, but great process has been made. I will split up the work into several topics which will be the subjects of the next few posts.

The final two weeks of the semester were spent fixing the current prototype. Due to some feedback from the rest of the team, the appearance of the application will likely be changing, but we wanted to make sure the basic functionality was complete.

This week was spent configuring the servlet and the database to respond to real queries from the phone. The phone application also had to switch over from using the placeholder data that was being displayed thus far, to parsing and displaying information from the web server.

Since querying the web server can take some time, it was also a challenge to ensure that the application is responsive at all times, even when waiting for a response from the remote server.

Weeks 10/11 were mostly spent implementing UI changes that the nutrional science team contributed at our last meeting. The servlet that is handling the phone queries was also rehauled exensively to allow for the type of restaurant menu requests that we are going to need to handle.

During week 9, I got the application to use the Google Places API to search for restaurants within a certain radius of the user. The location is obtained using the GPS of the phone.