Semester Progress (Part 3)

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 end result is a fairly user friendly application that should be ready for user testing. The results of our meetings up till now has been developing the app until this point, and now we are ready to test its usefulness to others. The rest of the team is giving me feedback on any remaining quirks or bugs in the app, and I am making the changes. Like it was mentioned in the database post, these changes can be made without physically updating the application on the device. I also created webpage forms for the other team members to use to update the database without me -- if, for example, they are struck by a sudden inspiration on health advice for a hamburger, they can navigate to a webpage and enter that in rather than open a terminal and be overwhelmed. I believe it is important that developer tools are developed alongside user programs, so that people other than computer scientists can be involved in development (or just so that development is quicker and easier).

The next post will have pictures of the application thus far, and will be posted when I have access to the necessary resources to take the screenshots.