Week 1

So this is the end of my first week working on the project. Today was a fairly annoying day, spent almost entirely on drawing a graph – or rather trying to get the app to draw a graph that looks good, scales up to any size nicely and generally is well behaved. Unfortunately Android canvas has a unique property of having its origin at the upper left corner, as opposed to the more usual lower left corner. Hence a lot of time was spent basically trying to turn the graph upside-down – or is that the right way up. Oh well, its done now.

Now I need to start working on the preferences and configuration tools as well as trying to get my head around SQLite databases. Then I suppose I might need to start actually getting some of the buttons doing things other than looking pretty.

Yesterday I spent some time making sure the app works correctly in a range of different screen sizes, versions of android and other arcane set ups. ActionBarSherlock certainly helps provide a degree of consistency across the different android versions and using the light theme means those horrific Gingerbread buttons don’t look awful, merely a bit weird. As seen in the last post, for tablets with wide screens I have included a layout with two columns, and a fair amount of time was spent working out what screen width was too narrow for this dual column layout. Turns out to be a bit less than 600dp. Yeah. (That kind of makes sense, as the radiobuttons are about 250dp width).