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.
A little over six months ago, I got a new phone. An HTC Hero to be precise, and I began fiddling with programming for it. I even started a fairly large project that made some progress, but then died out, because it was simply too grand for me to manage as a first-time project. Or rather, it was large enough that I wouldn’t be getting any files out there for people to try out anytime soon, which was one thing I was anxious to do… Upload my software, watch as people downloaded it, hear what they thought of it.
So the project was put to rest, for now… I may resurrect it later, or I may in fact start over with the things I learn doing the smaller projects.
Calorie Calculator is a really simple application, in that all it does is take a user’s stats (height, weight, age and gender), then calculates various statistics from these, including caloric burn, and current BMI. All simple stuff that just is a tad annoying to calculate by hand, especially when you need to remember the formulas for it.
When I started the project, I decided to go with an approach I would call “tiny milestones”, although I suppose “baby steps” would be good too… I started out really simple, then added more steps that would gradually increase the complexity of the software. The steps were as follows:
v0.1.x
- Creating one, simple Activity that showed the fields that needed to be filled out, as well as a “Calculate” button that would display the results in a dialog.
v0.2.x
- Support more than just the metric system.
- Make an appearance on Android Market and AndAppStore.
v0.3.x
- Improve the UI significantly.
- Optimize calculation library
- Find out more about how people are using the app.
I’m currently working on the v0.3.x one, but as you can probably see, the initial demands were small, then gradually increase in complexity, although neither of these are really all that complex, they do have an increasingly bigger impact on the application and its functionality.
I was amazed to find that already at v0.2.x, and after the first release, I had two major errors in the software. And I define major as “anything that makes the application force close (ie. crash)”. They were both relating to numbers, and while one of them was a “duh!” moment, the other one was really confusing, and the solution “makes the baby Jesus cry”, so to speak… I’ll probably post more about this some other time, but for now, I just wanted to actually make an update on my blog, and get some stuff down in writing again.