Programming – It's a way of life

So my plan to take small steps, and start out really simple, only to work toward something bigger, has paid off. I actually have an application out there, and people are downloading it, trying it out.

Due to its simplicity people usually only try it out once, and then no more, but that’s perfectly fine by me, since I rarely use it either. After all, it’s not exactly a tool you need very often, so why should people use it much?

However, I’m now going to start working toward making it a better tool, and one that people can hopefully use more than just once or twice. The first step will be to implement preference support, as that will form the basis for profiles. This will come in very handy in the future, when the tool will allow people to count calories and track their weight using this tool. I want to be able to support multiple users in the same app, so that families that wants to start counting calories together, can do so without having to get several devices.

What’s in the future for this app? Well there’s a LOT that can be done, and I’m full of ideas, but I’m still pacing myself, taking things one step at the time. So preference and profile support first, then we’ll see.. I may add a few extra items to v0.5, but that will only happen if I deem them to naturally belong together.

Well this is a rather pleasant surprise. I hadn’t honestly expected to finish this version while I was at vacation, but obviously I managed to do just that.

Visually not a whole lot has changed. There’s a new icon, and the entry forms are now using tables for layout instead of the normal linear layout. A new calculation has been added to the application, offering an alternative calculation of ideal weight.

Other than that, a single bug was fixed, and a small internal change to allow reuse of some of the code in other projects was made.

The newest version of the application has been released now, a few days later than I’d planned for, but that’s still acceptable by my measures. I’ll post more about it tomorrow, but for now, I really need to get some sleep.

I’ve been working on the next release of Calorie Calculator for a couple of days now, and so far I’m liking what I see.

I believe I’ve made some good changes to the interface, that will make it easier to figure out, and I’ve set up some additional usage data reporting, which will enable me to more easily track down errors in the software. Continue reading →

Wow… It sure has been a while since I last wrote anything in this blog. I would claim I’ve just been busy, but quite frankly that would be a lie… I just haven’t really been doing anything related to programming that I felt was worth writing about. Mainly I’ve doing lots of other work, but meh, this isn’t about me.

So this new project… What’s it about? Does it actually do anything useful? And… Android?!? These are questions you may or may not have, but I’m going to answer then anyway, because I’m weird like that. Continue reading →