Development Blog

During the development of the application I wrote an accompanying blog discussing the milestones of development.

• A Small Update — 14 November 2012

  I finished work on this project at the end of September. At this point I had got a working website, the app was pretty much complete and could upload the patient data to our website so their doctor can view progress online. Since then I have resumed my degree study and as such have had little chance to work on the project.

• Restart — 12 September 2012

  I’ve been back developing the app for about a week and a half now, having had August off. It’s been a fun week overall barring the pain of moving in and trying to sort out lots of house problems.

• Week 4 — 31 July 2012

  Week 4 is now over, I am back home with the parents and get to spend a month not doing anything.

• Week 3 — 20 July 2012

  End of another week, and the questionnaire has finally gone out to the world. It will be interesting to see where it goes and what we get back. Jeremy has asked for responses by the end of July, as that is when we are aiming to have v1.0 ready for release however that seems an unlikely deadline if I know academics. Still, once I have written up the documentation, screenshots and have a Play link, it should be relatively painless to forward that on to anyone inquiring.

• Services and receivers — 16 July 2012

  Today has been a long day with a lot of things learnt along the way. I was trying to set up the scheduling and notifications in the app, which meant making a background service and a BroadcastReceiver. This in itself shouldn’t be a problem, but I spent far too much time either being stupid, writing stuff I ended up binning or just trying to fix problems that weren’t there. Oh well.

• Week 2 — 13 July 2012

  There haven’t been many big advances since Wednesday really, just more of the same. Slowly building functionality and screens until it all comes together.

• Halfway through another week — 11 July 2012

  Its been an interesting few days so far this week. Following a meeting with my supervisor on Monday, I worked on making a way for the doctor to input the questions for the patient questionnaire. Monday was spent mostly working on layouts, making things look nice etc.

• Week 1 — 6 July 2012

  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.

• Start — 4 July 2012

  The project started off on Monday, so now I have had a couple of days to get my head around what I am doing. Apart from a lot of confusion on my first day, everything has been going well. My supervisor is enthusiastic and full of ideas of how to make the app bigger and better.