Pre-Production -> Production

Written by: Quincy Williams

This week, we officially have left pre-production and are now in full blown production mode. We had our first meeting with the team, mentors and producer, to go over the application, discuss our expectations for the application in the coming month, and also we were able to show off our build of the application in its current state.

Currently, the team and I working on getting more of the front end portion of the application going, so we can provide a visual of what the app is expected to look like and then we are going to work on getting int the back end portion of it to provide the functionality that we want to incorporate into the application.

For my portion of the application this week, I am going to be working on the Exercise portion of the application. This will be a grid view that the user will see when the select the Exercise option at the bottom of the screen, in the navigation bar, and this will give the user a list of muscle groups to choose from, and see exercises that they can perform that will work on that muscle group. This will later have functionality that will tie into the goals system that we are going to implement into the application as well.

Here is a preview of what the exercise screen will look like as we move into production. Please note, this screenshot shows the screen in its early stages, with more progress and functionality to be added to it this week.

The current images are placeholders that will have text that indicate what the muscle groups are and also have images that better denote the muscle group that can be selected. This is a scrollable GridView that was put together using a java class, that will get its view from a xml file that holds the fragment, and was also created using a custom adapter that extends the base adapter class that will be attached to the fragment file that will create the view on startup.

Adapter being attached to the grid view housing the exercises

Custom Adapter Class

When implementing this, it was difficult to figure out how to make the adapter work as it is very particular in what the functions that are defined in the adapter class will return. If one of the classes returns 0, the adapter will be ignored on create and we get a blank screen. Not a good feeling after 80 lines of code to put it together.

After making some adjustments to the adapter and doing research to find good ways to implement a grid view, I was able to put this screen together. I was able to research a way to be able to pass an array of images to the adapter and have it populate the grid view when the grid view attaches itself to the adapted in the main java class that is controlling the view and the functionality. The array of images will help with being able to dynamically load new images to the grid view that will be able to be clickable, via an onClickListener that will be automatically added for each image in the array, and add more options of exercises, in a future release. This was a huge time saver! The next step will be for me to be able to generate text that can be attached to each of the images so that the user will know exactly what they are clicking on. There was a little bit of tweaking needed to get the xml layout to look just right and for the images to be properly sized in the grid view.

The view from the adapter that is being called by the main class after the adapter is attached to the grid view