The past week I have been putting my technical skills in mobile application to the test. I feel that I must elevate my abilities in this department to a professional level in order to be an assist to any future companies I work for in the future. Furthermore, I may be building a mobile application (pending user research) for my thesis so I want to ensure that I am more than capable to realise goals I set for myself. I have been anticipating mobile development since my first semester of my Masters. I enrolled in Object Orientated Programming in order to refresh and enhance my ability in Java and OOP in general. This will prove to be very beneficial as the Java language makes up a large part of applications created in Android Studio. Practising in Android Studio will strengthen my skills in both design and application functionality.

So before Christmas I bookmarked A LOT of tutorials hoping that I would someday get stuck into them. Fortunately I have finally gotten underway (only took me a few months!) At first I plan to be meticulous, going over every single foundational technique. I want to be able to recall basics at an instant. I have created multiple small apps this week. Nothing amazing, but a start point nonetheless. I performed exercises that implemented layouts, user inputs, images, buttons and also started incorporating classes to my Java files. The four most notable apps I made this week are:

1. Currency Convertor
2. Note Taker
3. Higher Lower Game
4. Square/Triangular Calculator

Currency Convertor implemented the use of ImageView, TextView, EditView, Toasts and Button. Not the most complicated application, but it allows users to enter an amount of Euros in the test field which would then convert into British Pounds after pushing the button. This taught me a lesson about ensuring I correctly convert variable types i.e. String to Double.

Note Taker was an opportunity for me to experiment with ArrayLists and ArrayAdapters (which is essentially a bridge between data stored and UI). Users are capable of adding “notes” onto the screen. Again, very basic. Down the road I will build on these ideas adding multiple functionality i.e. removing items, saving lists etc. Its still really the starting point for me so don’t expect world changing applications in the next week or so.

Higher Lower Game once again implemented user text field entry. The application prompts the user to guess a number between 0-20 and then guides them to whether their guess is too high or too low. Notably this programme used the Random Class. I have used this classes countless times before but for the purpose of this “starting from scratch” mobile app journey…its a first! I also implemented some error prevention. In a likely scenario a user enters “nothing” I needed to avoid the programme crashing. Ordinarily I would use a try/catch setup but seeing as the user is pretty limited to either either choosing an integer or a blank string, I just used a simple ‘if’ condition.

Square/Triangular Calculator would be the most Java work involved in these basic apps to date. Within this programme I began to start implementing classes. So every time a user entered a number  they were actually creating an object relative to the Number class I created under the hood. Once the button was clicked, the programme would run two methods and do some calculating to see whether it was a square or triangular number. The results are then displayed to the user as a pop up message.

So that is pretty much my week of mobile application work. To the most advanced programmer, I have bored you! But you got to start somewhere eh. Oh and I would offer the above codes to readers but to be fair, you could probably find them anywhere on the internet. In my case, it was Udemy that provided the helping hand. Anyway, looking forward I plan to continue my mobile application practise and also I think its about time I start documenting some published papers I have been reading. Like all mobile application creators, I want my product to have sustainability;  making the user to constantly want to use it. So I will do a bit of research into gamification in order to find out the what/how/why gaming elements that can help better the pleasure of using an app.