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.
UI changes
There aren’t a lot of changes yet, but the initial screen (the measurement selection screen) has been altered to be more aesthetically pleasing, and hopefully the user will be able to figure it out much faster.
Nothing has changed in the main screen yet, but the results screen is being moved from a simple, custom dialog, to a separate activity, which should be prettier to look at too, and which will feature clickable icons for getting additional help in the form of dialogs.
I forgot to mention that I got some help with the new UI. I asked a friend who studies this sort of thing, and he gave me some sound advice indeed.
Code clean-up
I decided that cleaning the code up some would probably be best as well, and I found quite a lot of redundant code that I could delete. There’s bound to be more as I progress, but it felt good to clean up the codebase at least a little.
Usage tracking
People have been complaining about weird results, so I figured it would be best to get some more information about this subject. I’ve made sure to pick a service that doesn’t gather any personal information, however, just to be sure I’m not violating anyone’s privacy. The system that I use for it wanted to get some positional information from either cell towers or GPS, but I specifically turned that off, so even if it did have permission to poll for that, it has been disabled in code, so it wouldn’t.
The most precise tracking it does now, is to track someone to a specific country, which I assume it does from the IP. Which reminds me, that I’m not privvy to the information about IPs either. I treasure privacy, after all, so I should be a hypocrite if I then broke my users’ right to privacy.
Release date
So I believe the initial release date I set for v0.3 (July 1st) seem to stick, which is good.