Development diary week 01 - GideonPARANOID/olandroid GitHub Wiki

Last week I started my dissertation. It's a bit scary that - my last big piece of university work - but something to be excited about! It's called a major project formally, but it sort of is a dissertation (the report will be about twenty thousand words), so I'm calling it that.

Broadly speaking, the aim of my dissertation will be to create a tool for modelling the acrobatic flight of aircraft. Modelling is an expansive topic, so to narrow it down a bit, my efforts will primarily be concerned with the visualisation & some kinematics. Acrobatic flights are described using either the Aresti system or OLAN's one. They are plenty of different manoeuvres & some of them can be quite complex.

I'm developing my response to the problem via an Android app, as I figured having a mobile way of visualising the flights would probably be of the most use to users. I've mucked around with Android with rooting & custom ROMs enough anyway, it's probably about time that I actually got into building apps.

Development will be following a fairly agile mindset (something like a mix between extreme programming & feature-driven development), & will hopefully settle into a bit more of a routine after my next meeting with my project supervisor (who acts a bit like a customer). Should be able to build some stories then to provide some focus. At the moment, I'm just in the prototype stage, learning what I'm going to be using - the Android platform & OpenGL ES (playing off my experience with WebGL). Despite that, I've already started working on a few ideas with the expectation of lots of refactoring. My first commit was about a week ago.

The project is scheduled to be fifteen weeks long. I'm aiming for a blog post a week where I'll discuss what I've been working on, problems faced & how I've tackled them. It'll be a summary of things I've written in my physical development diary. I find actually writing things down to be a much easier, more free way of working out things than typing them, so don't blame me if there's not a great deal here!

This has all sounded a bit grey so far. It's been a slow day in terms of development, so forgive my writing for being a bit dour. I'm enjoying development so far, it's been good to write in a statically typed language again, certainly feels like a long time since I did that (I usually work in JavaScript, PHP or Bash). I've found it encouraging the pace at which development has been going so far, here's a video of a recent build. I'm looking forward to getting dug further in & sharing my progress!