Quincy's Coding Journey

Written by: Quincy Williams This week, I continued to work on improving the User Interface and fixing a few bugs that were presented during our testing for build review. The main thing that I worked on for UI improvement was adding and editing exercises and fixing some issues with the initial design, as it was not the cleanest look. I was able to update the xml for the adding and editing functions to give a cleaner look of the activities but still provide some visual cues to the user on what can be clicked on and what is just plain text. The views were initially updated to have a card for every field but we decided that it made the design a little off putting and went with generalizing the fields into groups for a cleaner look. UI Update for adding exercises Now adding and editing exercises will have this new cleaner UI. The xml is updated to have the cards views hold more fields and now they have headers and the fields that are able to be clicked on are underlined, via edits to the st...

Written by: Quincy Williams This week we started the final month of development for our application and we are working the final push towards a final product. During this time, we are going to be strongly focusing on UI improvements to provide the best experience possible. Each of us are currently focusing on working on the pieces of the application that we felt, and users from testing felt, needed some revisions and cleanup. This week, I focused on updating the UI's for Timers, Body Metrics and Adding/Editing exercises. The first two portions were me making adjustments to the layout of the fragments so they are more compatible for smaller devices as much of the build has been created using a bigger device, so compatibility needed to be added into the build as well. There was an issue with how certain fields seemed cramped on smaller devices and looked normal on larger screens, so there was a need to make the views more consistent across device sizes and I was able to make xml adju...

Written by: Quincy Williams This weeks focus was on user testing and making improvements to the application based on some of the findings that we received from our testing. A few things that were noted that were common between our rounds of testing, were that there were some inconsistencies within the UI and there were some improvements that could be made to make things easier for the user to use the application. One of the things that stood out for me was the ability to add and edit exercises. Users reported that adding exercises were not very user friendly, especially for the beginner who is not very familiar with some of the details that were being asked of them to enter. There were also some issues presented with editing exercises, in specific, with exercises that were locally loaded. We were also presented with issues on how routines are completed, noting that there were moments where there may have been too many things going on and not a lot of visual cues. Overall, the impressio...

Written by: Quincy Williams This week, I continued to focus on finishing up the exercises functionality by introducing the ability for users to be able to edit exercises. This will allow for users to be able edit both loaded and added exercises and add the edited version back into their respective arraylist in the application. With that being said, there were a few issues that I ran into with doing this. Once I was able to get the date from the exercise, by pulling its ID and gathering the data from the ID, the fields would be filled in a new activity with the data but when the data was saved and the exercise was opened in exercise details, the formatting functions that we using were causing the data to return in an unclean fashion. This would continue to happen every time the exercise was added. To get around this, I was able to come up with a way to check for specific values in a string and use the replaceAll method to replace those specific strings with an empty string. After replac...

 Written by: Quincy Williams This week, I continued my focus on the exercise portion of the application as we come down to our final weeks of production of our app. There was a lot of focus on bug fixes as we are getting to the portion of development where the features are starting to be able to work together and in turn is introducing unexpected behaviors. One of the main behaviors I was able to work out this week was how we allowed users to enter data. I needed to adjust some of the functions that we had in place that took care of formatting text from the json and also allow for the functions to think about user input as well. The function was adjusted so that if we did not need to properly format the text that was entered, that it should return that text. Initially, the logic was more strict to the json files that are locally loaded for our exercises as all of the information was essentially improperly formatted so there was very little variance needed in order to check if the t...