Francesca

Francesca:

The idea of creating a utility app came the
first day, and it was nice having the
impression that it was easily achievable….
But already the next day the excitement left
the way to insecurity and fear of not being
able to finish in time.

Week 3

Technical feasibility:Finding the technology that will help us making the app realizable

During this week the group had to focus on the presentation
more than the project itself, so there wasn’t much
communication about it. although, we already started
dividing our tasks. In fact, Charlie is working very hard
on the graphical side and already started designing a
beautiful layout and logo for the presentation and the
final project.

Of course, each of us has chosen a couple of paragraphs
to talk about, and we all agreed on the due date, so that
Charlie would have had some extra time for the layout

Week 4

Design and Development

During this week the group had divided the first tasks:
Charlie will start implementing the interface and final
look of the app, from the appearance of each activity to
the friendly usability
Tony, will study and try to come up with a solution about
the map on the first activity, which will display the
google map with the carparks connected to our app

I will take care of the database.

After creating a DB with XAMPP, I found out that i will need also to create a Web server to link it to the app,
so next step will be learning how to do this

Week 5

Design and Development

During this week we have respected our goals... Tony has found a way to display the pin on the map, and i finished creating the DB. So far it is populated with fake data, but I believe i will be able to found real data about the car park chosen as case of study, so that those data will be ready for the app to use.

Week 6

Design

This week the assignment due took much time away from the project... i was working and researching about real data for the real car park we have chosen, but it is difficoult to find online, so there will be only two ways: changing the case of study or creating a picture of the car park itself, by going on the spot and drawing a map by scratch. Both praticable, even though i found out that The Strand is only 1 level... so not much relevant for our project. Another option could be changing the scenario picking for example the Tullamarine car park, which i could find an actual map online:

with 2 levels as shown above. Tomorrow we will discuss with the others about this issue and we will agree on what to do. So far, i have sent them a message asking for ideas.

Week 7

Design and Development

This week we are working at the design and trying to produce a definitive wire frame. So far we agreed to a scratch and Charlie is working hard to make up a definitive design. I am confident that for the end of this week we should have it done, as planned. In parallel Tony is working and optimizing the map system.

My task now is to study Android and understand how to link the app to the DB, wit=ch is a big challenge, since I have never worked with this technology and every baby step looks very complicated. In fact, studying I reliazed I will need to change the DB I was using. If I use a MySQL DB, I will have to create the WebServer I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, but online, many developers reccomend to use FireBase (from Google) wich is a web application development platform, which allows also the creation of realtime DB on the cloud, ignoring complitely the WebServer side. The only problem is that now the structure is not relational anymore, which means that the whole structure created so far is kind of useless. I will have to think about a tree structure, to replace complitely the previous mysql DB.

So far so good. I have managed to build the new DB:

Of course the structure has changed. Before I had 3 tables -carparks
-users
-spots
wherease now i will have a branch starting from the carpark (Strand), which will have children representing the levels and info such as working hours and prices, and users (User), which will have children representing each user:
- CarPark1
-- level1
--- spot1
--- spot2
--- spot3

-- level2

--- spot1
--- spot2
--- spot3

-- closingTime

-- dayPrice

-- hourPrice

-- openingTime

- User

-- User1

--- email

--- name

--- password

-- User2

--- email

--- name

--- password

the missing information can be stored into the app itself. For example, for the activity about the car spot that reminds about last car spot where the car has been parked, the info does not have to be included necessary in the DB (in that case that could be a new record in the user branch, remembering this info) but it could be stored into a variable directly in the application, so that the implementation is a little bit easier, but still, there is not information loss.
Now the big challenge is to understand how to connect the app to this DB and receive information from it.

Week 8/9

Design and Development

This week we are working at the others pages such as menu, profile and car park. At this time it is all about studying android studio and understand how this new language works

*android studio for beginners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFlPARW5IX8&t=1649s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ow3L39Wxmg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdGpT1pIJlw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5Y3uZ6LLM
*connection with firebase:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QETnC6SEwa0