Whoops.

(This blog post is a few weeks old and never was posted), I’ve been pecking away at the app, though.  Jon built a great foundation for our app and it’s time to get cracking and finish this bad boy.  Right now I’m playing catchup on all the documentation for Android (big thanks to Jon for meeting and walking me through).  TheNewBoston started to get too slow and I started using google development docs, big difference and ultimately better.

Finals are coming up for my summer class and then I can focus on this app.

My First App

I never mentioned in my previous post that I have been watching www.thenewboston.org ‘s video series throughout the past few weeks.  He’s a young guy and it’s kind of funny learning from him sometimes, weird little things bother me sometimes, I’m weird, it’s weird.  But!

I wrote my first app, you can push a button to add or push a button to subtract! Can’t wait to publish it to Google play..  It’s a good building block to start from.

————————————-

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android&#8221;
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”fill_parent”
android:orientation=”vertical” >

<TextView
android:id=”@+id/tvDisplay”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_gravity=”center”
android:gravity=”center”
android:text=”Total =”
android:textSize=”45dp” />

<Button
android:id=”@+id/addButton”
android:layout_width=”250dp”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_gravity=”center”
android:text=”Add One”
android:textSize=”20dp” />
<Button
android:id=”@+id/subButton”
android:layout_width=”244dp”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_gravity=”center”
android:text=”Subtract One”
android:textSize=”20dp” />

</LinearLayout>

——————–

Does wordpress not have a <code> tag? Gross.

But, that’s XML a lot of referencing android:layout, or just android in general, who would have thunk it?!  XML seems pretty straight forward, oddly enough the day after I learned some of it I had to write it a bit for my internship, which was pretty cool.

Keeping Scheduled Meet Times

I spoke with John this week, he works in Lowell and I live about 5 minutes or so from his work I we met for a quick meal and talked about what we’ve done.  I’m still trying to get in contact with Joe, I don’t know what he’s doing.  But, we both realized we were letting work take up a bit too much of our time we are going to start meeting at least once a week on a google+ hangout and teach each other what we’ve learned.

Also, I have set aside a few days a week a few hours after work to sit in my office and learn / write xlm/java to get some little android apps up and running.  Today is the first of the sit downs and it’s a lot better of an idea than “I’ll just do it when I get free time”  because summer has been itching for me to just go outside and hang with friends.

This idea of “class time” in my office is going to work out well.

First Week install/configure

It’s been a slow start to the project, nice weather tends to do that to me.  I manged to find a great video series about Android development that really starts from the ground up.  Actually, it’s kind of boring at times when he begins to talk about what’s going on in the Java code he’s typing, the XML I am lost but the Java is pretty straight forward (for now).

I have mixed feelings about using Eclipse for this project, I think it will come in handy most of the time but, it’s really bloated.  I like Gedit, or I guess notepad++ for windows.

I watched the first videos, downloaded Eclipse, downloaded everything I needed, John wants to work on Android 4.03 since his phone will be able to use it.  It’s going to work fine but, just won’t be available to as many people considering it’s a much newer version than the API level 8 that was suggested in the video series.   The videos came in handy since I thought it was always kind of a pain in the neck to set up Eclipse in Java.

It’s pretty convenient that I am learning XML because I had to use it recently at my job, and knew where I was because of watching a few videos.

Onto Android

John, Joe, and myself have begun a new project and have said goodbye to Eucalyptus.  We will be designing our own app for the android market.  John had been talking for a while about how he needed a task manager that actually did what he wanted and needed it to do.  No, not a task manager to kill processes etc but one designed to integrate with a calendar, or any other event based program we can use.  We will be designing a ‘normal’ task manager app at first but will be making it very modular because we’re really not sure how difficult the development process will be.  We will add as we need, or if we can, many key features that will actually make the app useful.  By the end we will submit it to Google Play and hope for the best.

The journey begins.

Have been reading design paradigms for Android Apps

Since I really have never owned an Android phone I don’t know much about their apps.  I spent a while today looking at the difference menu styles and how to design to optimize for certain button layouts.  Some phones have more buttons..stuff like that.  As I was browsing this my reddit feed led me to this link: http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/06/emerging-ui-pattern-side-navigation.html which talks about the side style menu, such as Facebook. I can only hope our app isn’t as slow as the Facebook one, though.  The article talks about how, “The side navigation replaces the much criticized dashboard pattern in the apps.”  I think it would be a cool implemented on our app.

On a side note, I think I need to find supplemental methods of learning Java/XML the Android way.  I don’t mind the new Boston but sometimes when he talks about stuff in Java that has been burned in my brain for life gets me distracted.

Final Thoughts about CS401/Eucalyptus

I had a lot of fun working in this class it was definitely a difference experience than almost all my CS courses before hand.   I liked working on a big project my only request for the future is to see more code but, something that was really unavoidable for a beta-test style class that we had.  I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault just too many problems with the cluster to really get into it.  Just because we didn’t get coding done doesn’t mean I didn’t learn quite a bit about how exactly working on a big project was like.  Learning to use git, irc, and being on a list server were pretty new experiences for me, aside from gaming I had never used irc, git seems to be invaluable to know since every employer I’ve talked to seemed excited that I already know it.

 

Main thing I’ll take away from the course is exactly what cloud computing is, all the nomenclature we’ve learned, how to work on large scale projects, how to communicate with a large group of people from different time zones and different backgrounds in programming/computer science.

 

Final presentations today were great, seemed like every group found a lot of different topics to talk about and cover and they all seemed to master their specific topic.

Final Wiki Adjustments

I never got around to putting up this blog post last week but I figure it’s worth posting.

 

After siting down with Chris while he worked his way through our wiki was great, really gave me a chance to see how a wiki flows through another set of eyes.  Luckily we’ve all been doing a great job of working with the wiki adding the needed information and adding it coherently.  Only issues really were fixing formatting adding things like, “don’t forget to use sudo” to the top of commands rather than after.  Only “big” changes I made to the wiki was adding a bit on git and how to install python user a package manager.

 

I enjoyed working with Chris getting his input, I think it was smart to do it on my own first, since I knew a bit on how to get everything running from doing it a few times, then having him go through.  Since I never posted this Karl mentioned that there is a whole field of engineering in something like that, actually testing your code/wiki/idea on an audience and jotting down notes.

Test Run of the Wiki

This week I am going to start from scratch and try to install Eutester+euca2ools from our wiki only, keeping notes along the way to see if we need to update anything to make it more clear.  I imagine from what I’ve been reading that we’ve made quite a large amount of progress over this course and when I had to restart last month it took me maybe an hour? (would be been less if I realized >>> meant that you type python ) but that’s besides the point.  This blog post will serve as a note pad for anything our wiki should make clearer.

 

 

Updated this:

I decided that I would find someone I could use that doesn’t really know much about Eucalyptus and at least knows how to work Linux.  It turned out pretty well, I have some notes jotted down that I can finalize the wiki with to make it as fast as possible.  Everything was pretty well laid out, aside form small things like the note “don’t forget to use sudo” after they entered all the commands.  One thing I need to add is that we never directly say to install boto.

 

Overall this test went pretty well.

More Wiki Editing and Python Learning

I added a big index at the top of the glossary page, learned how to actually link to certain part of a web page in a PMwiki, was actually a lot easier than what I figured it was here was where I found it, turns out you just make a simple [[#anchor | text ]] at the particular part where you want to reference you #anchor that part then  use [[#anchor | text]] and you’re done.   It was silly tedious to do but, it does give it a quicker and easier way to access the glossary, also props to Dan Adams, the glossary is looking very nice.  Since I learned how to use links without having to just post the ‘ugly’ url same page as the anchor tutorial I have been fixing the entire glossary page so it will read “read more”, “wikipedia entry” or something along those lines.  With those edits I am also fixing the capitalization of each entry.

EuTester has been great for learning Python, I was long over due to learn it anyways.  I started using Zed A. Shaw’s book (great resource for learning a language for free/very cheap) and then after I knew enough to make better sense then I started looking at all the Python that eutester had.  Commenting has been great for learning because it forces me to look at the code, analyze what I am reading, then form coherent ideas from that. Zed’s book along with the multitude of forums while google searching has really been great.