On Friday night, I thought it would be cool to have an app where the user could set up a series of alarms. I would set up the alarms to manage my workouts. For example, do jumping jacks for 1 minute, break for 10 seconds, do pushups for 30 seconds, etc ... Maybe it could be used in a pomodoro like system or even as a day planner. Going back to the minimal viable version, it would just be a list of items with associated time durations. When you hit 'Start', the timers would clock down in order.
Rather than looking for an app that already does what I want, I figured it might be good to try building it on my own. I haven't done any Android development in a while, so I'd like to pick it up again to see how what's changed. It would be fun to work on this project because it's simple and thus easy to make progress in.
When you start working in a new technology stack (or one that you haven't worked in for a while) everything seems to take longer than expected. Since I hadn't touched Android Studio IDE in a while, when I opened it, it had a few updates for me to install. I then fumbled around with testing in the emulator, before I remembered that using a real device is immensely faster. I also spent some time trying to use the Android designer before giving up and updating layout xmls by hand. Everything, even the most basic API calls, seemed to require a google search to make any progress.
After a few hours of work, I got something working. It's a working app that (for now) has two items (alarms). You can change the description of each and the duration of each. Then the timer will count down using the sum total of the durations. It's obviously missing a lot of features, but I'm happy I got started on the project. Because getting started on project is always hard to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment