Quincy's Coding Journey

-Written by: Quincy Williams This week, my focus was on notifications. I ran into some issues with getting the notifications to work as there are many different ways to achieve how notifications are displayed to the user and when. The main goal was to be able to have the user control the ability of when the notification is seen or not, based on a setting in the settings activity. This was accessed by shared preferences to be able to detect if the options was set to determine if the notification should fire, via a boolean value. The more difficult issue as figuring out the best way to have the application alert the user with a notification. There were a lot of options but the best option seemed to be using an AlarmManager and receiver to have the notification trigger at a specific time of the day. This required creating three separate classes to house each activity. The notification needed to be built to allow for the user to be able to click on the notification and open the app, so cha...

-Written by: Quincy Williams This week I worked on cleaning up some issues that I was having with the rest timer. The functionality was present that the timer was able to run if the user entered a time but the values were only allowed in minutes. After doing some research, trying to get two separate values from an edit text field in Android Studio is not the easiest, and I was able to discuss some options with my team and we came up with the idea of having the user be able to choose to use minutes or seconds via a spinner object. This allowed for the same edit text field to be used and also also allow the user to be able to set the time of their choosing. This also allowed for the view to remain simple and clean for the activity. Example of the Rest Timer activity screen From the example above, the user can select the value to be used from the spinner, and based on the spinners option, a boolean value (minutes, seconds) is set that will tell the application how to process conversion of...

Written by: Quincy Williams This week, I focused on creating the rest timer activity and finishing up the body metrics activity for the RepAdvisor app. For the rest timer, I ran into the issue of what was the best way to make the timer easy to use for the user, and this created a few different design issues and a lot of refactoring until I was able to find a simple way to handle how the user can set the timer. The user will be able to set the value of time that they want to rest via an edit text field that they can use a button to fill in the timer value. This will occur via a conversion in the timer java class that will take the users value and convert it to milliseconds and report out as a time based on what the user entered. The updateCountDownText function will handle making sure the timer is set to what the user expects when it is set, paused and stopped. There are other background functions that are in play as well but this function is what makes sure everything stays formatted. ...

 Written By: Quincy Williams This week I worked on the Body Metrics activity. This activity will allow for users to be able to add there body metrics to the application and then the application will take that data and perform calculations for the user to see, based on the most common formulas that the people will usually like to know when they are on a fitness journey to show progress. To develop this, I created edit text items to hold the data, and text views to identify the different fields that the edit texts will preform calculations on. The last three fields are not editable as they will be filled with data after calculations are completed. In the background, in our Utils java file, we have functions that will be called that will complete the calculations for BMI, Lean Body Mass, and Body Fat %.  Example Body Metric Function The activity will also be able to use the metric system setting in the application, that will convert fields that use imperial values to use metric v...

 -Written by Quincy Williams This week, I was able to get the finishing touches on the exercises portion of the application. This is one of the main functions of the application, as this will provide the user some exercises that they can perform and even be able to add those exercises to a goal. The past few weeks, have been working on getting that part of the application fully up and running and this week, we were able to achieve that. With this being one of the main features of the application, it was very important to get this piece working so the base of the application is working and we can begin to work on some of the smaller pieces of the application, so we can provide a full user experience when using the application. The final piece that I needed to work on this week was getting the exercise activity of the application to work with the goal activity of the application after creating a final view for the exercises. I had to create a view for each exercise that would show so...