Mobile App Exercises

March 11, 2016May 16, 2016Leave a comment

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. Continue reading →

Mobile Application Basics: BlueJ

May 26, 2015April 4, 2016Leave a comment

In my third year of college I chose Mobile Application as my elective. This module appealed to me because I have a passion for creating code whereby the end product can produce fascinating results. I wanted to enhance my programming skills with regards with mobile application in order to strengthen my skill set and better my chances in the future of obtaining employment. Weekly labs were very beneficial and provided me with the foundational knowledge required before tackling advanced projects in Mobile Application. The module primarily focused on using BlueJ but it is an intention of mine to further educate myself in the near future with regards to creating mobile apps and using Java software.

World Clock Development

Lab Work

Our final project was to develop an application that will allow users view several times (or clocks) on their screen simultaneously. This type of application is often packaged in Smart-phones and other devices. The application was to provide the user with a list of cities/locations to choose from. The user should be able to select one (or more) cities and then click on the “plus” button (or its equivalent) to add them to the display. Selecting a city or cities and clicking on the “minus” button (or its equivalent) should remove those cities from the display. This projects, and smaller ones before this, displayed the use of layout managers, containers, colours, fonts, borders, spacing and so on.

Below is a video showcasing the final project and some other the other lab works:

Basic Interactive HTML Page

May 25, 2015April 4, 2016Leave a comment

Created 2012:

Early 2012, myself and my classmates were given our first project in our module Web Development. It was set to test our abilities in making a very basic HTML page. I realized that there was similarities between creating web pages and what I had learned using Java. Both require a good understanding of writing code. Taking what I had learned from lectures and also the recommended website (http://www.w3schools.com), I had to create five separate HTML files. Each one would be a track listing of five of my favorite albums. We were encouraged to be creative and unique as possible i.e use attractive fonts, appealing layout, video links, using CSS sheets. I used MAMP to run these pages via my local host.

Creating a basic interactive page

In addition to these 5 HTML pages, I incorporated my knowledge of PHP in order to introduce interactivity allowing a user to toggle between the pages. To begin with, I decided to create my HTML page first, with the drop down list. I had already created a CSS file with instructions so I was easily able to surround my drop down list with a nice border I set up. When I was creating the list, I assigned each album a number so that it could refer to it when I ran it through PHP i.e ‘One’ would relate to ‘Muse’.

Selection Page

This meant that the HTML would call on the ‘myphp.php’ file that I had also created. Once I was satisfied that my code was correct and should work once I created the PHP file, I decided to design my page to make it more attractive. I set the background to sky blue. The page seemed very plain so I added some .jpg images to the bottom of the screen. Each image was of the cover art of each album (I also inserted a ‘Welcome’ picture). I manually set the location of each image to line them up perfectly (top: xxpx; left: xxpx) and also gave each image a dashed outline. I wanted to make each image clickable so I linked each image to the each of the band’s homepages. Whatever option was selected in my HTML link would open up the desired page. I set it that $A would be equal to whatever was selected in the drop down. In turn, I could then use if conditions to initiate pieces of code i.e if $A == ‘One’, then this would call on my code for the ‘Muse’ page and therefore linked the Muse option in the list and the album page together. In each album page, I made use of my CSS sheet and made the headings of each album page the same. I set each background and table colours differently to suit the artwork I placed in there. My aim was to make each page appealing and very clear. Using table tags I was able to neatly format my pages. I sometimes overwrote the original CSS settings to suit particular pages also i.e with the tags. A brief description of each album was placed at the end of each page in sans serif , for easier reading.

My Arctic Monkeys Page Screenshot

My The Strokes Page Screenshot

What I learned:

Basic coding in HTML, PHP, CSS and how they interlink.
Coding involved fonts, headers, colours, menus, tables, embed videos, images etc.
How MAMP works.
The importance of root files and their locations.
Making pages user friendly to be aesthetically pleasing but also fully functional.
Getting user feedback i.e. usability test, is very important.