Development diary week 06 - GideonPARANOID/olandroid GitHub Wiki

The usual weekly development diary post is a bit late this week, due to being away, & on a train when I usually post. However, work has still progressed fairly well.

The most noticeable addition this week is a huge volume of extra manoeuvres - the manoeuvre catalogue file is now over two thousand lines! I've now got about seventy five percent of all the manoeuvres I found on OpenAero encoded in components, & drawable in app. This also includes ones with rolls, which, while they worked before, were not drawn in a very pretty way. Now the vertices all match up with some nifty trigonometry & rolls look nice & smooth. A nice simple example of this is the Immelman turn (which I got my head around by watching lots of videos of people on flight simulators on YouTube).

With this large number of new manoeuvres, the manoeuvres list started looking a bit daunting & made finding specific manouevres hard. To fix this, I implemented a spinner to allow users to select a manoeuvre category (one element moves, loops, etc. & then that changes the contents of the listview.

I've added a few items to the action bar this week. Firstly, a shift of the animation button to the action bar & to an icon, then a help button which brings up a dialogue box with some useful information, & then a settings menu. The settings menu had been there for a while, I just didn't get round to doing anything with it until this week, when I wrote some colour themes for the visualisation. Now the background, grid, front & back of the line can all be themed. Currently, I only have the one I had before & a Tron-inspired one, but more may come.

It's been quite a productive week, & part of that has been due to making the application available to some testers, via the Google Play Store (closed) beta testing programme. It lets me see that the app has been running on multiple different devices, of different hardwares & softwares, & see any crash information (none as of yet, thankfully), which will no doubt be useful if I do run into any problems. Also, having a working version out there is inspiring to keep working! It's a great motivator, seeing the 'MMP has been updated' notification on my devices.

Another thing I've got working this week is device testing using Monkey - a tool which generates loads of random events on a device to seem how resilient the application is to crashing. In a run of 500 events, it didn't crash once, which is good. I'd like to find a way of incorporating this better into my existing test framework though, as I currently have to initiate it manually through adb at the moment.

Last but not least, this week's demo.