Some semblance of a UI is taking shape

Friday night and Saturday I started adding a basic user interface to the prototype. I’m not much of UI/UX guy and in my mind, this isn’t really intended to be an application that people interact with – it should just run seemlessly in the background without sucking up your battery like a vampire. From a developer’s point of view though, it’s really a pain if the only way I can test it out is to hook it up to my development computer and view a log trace. So Friday night I ventured into the android world of layouts and basic views/activities. What started off as an application with one screen and two buttons – start and stop has now evolved into an app with a second tab that displays a list of your historical locations. I’m using a ListView and each item is simply showing the toString() value of a TrackPoint object (my own custom minimized version of a Location).

Now I get a general idea of what’s going on while on the road – no need to plug into my computer and cat the file I’m persisting data to. So far I’ve notice a few things – the GPS actually works better indoors than I would have expected – supposedly I was getting hits inside Costco, a Discount Wine Warehouse and one of my friends apartments (maybe I just don’t get a signal in mine because it’s halfway underground). More importantly, Latitude and Longitude readouts don’t do a lot for me and I’m sick of confirming the data by typing them into Google Maps =)

Therefore as much as I’d like to jump into some serialization and battery utilization improvements, I think the next most important thing to do is probably add a MapView tab that plots the historical points on a map rather than just spitting out a list of Latitude and Longitude – that will make verifying the integrity of the data much easier. Additionally, I imagine it will be nice for eventual users (the ones that I’d like to say should be able to install it and forget it) to get a nice warm and fuzzy feeling from seeing a visual display of just what it is they’re donating.

Fortunately Google makes plotting points ona map a relatively painless undertaking (or so I’ve been lead to believe). I’m going through the exercise right now, but so far have run into a minor roadblock – installing the api… As far as I can tell from the documentation it looks like I may just need to update my sdk. I’m in the process of downloading updates and with any luck I’ll be able to get back to development in a few minutes once the download is completed.

To be continued…