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Thread: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

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    Smile Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    I want to try Android programming but I want to tackle a worthy project, could you guys give me ideas?
    Regards,


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    MS SQL Powerposter szlamany's Avatar
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    How about helping me figure out how to decode JSON strings coming back from IIS web methods!

    Java is a huge pain!

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    I don't do any JSON or IIS but if it will give some goodies then I will try it.
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    While there are a million (ok, thousands) of Android "stopwatch" or "timer" programs most of them sort of suck.

    Think of all those movies and TV shows where the hero is running a timer on his phone. Maybe he's waiting on a countdown to perform some synchronized action, so he needs to plug in the amount of time to count down, hit the "start" to start the countdown, and when it gets near 0:00 it starts sounding an alarm and then at 0:00 maybe it inverts the screen colors and sounds a long beep, etc.

    So you might want to be able to select "countdown" vs. count up mode. You'd want easy entry of the countdown amount. Maybe "radio preset" buttons for 1:00, 10:00, 20:00 with up/down to modify these (as well as just "keypad" entry).

    You'd want the ability to set the "near 0:00" time to start beep-beep-beeping each final second (and maybe a reasonable default such as 0:10). You probably also want to be able to suppress audible alerts (you might be hiding from those bad guys in a closet).

    You want big, bold digits and high contrast. You want quick and easy fat-finger use because hey, you're in a situation here!

    You may need an option to keep the screen from going to sleep, the stuff is hitting the fan and who wants to fiddle with lock-screen gestures now? Maybe a UI-lock within the program itself to prevent accidentally stopping the timer (click an upper-left then lower-right button within 0.5 seconds to unlock)?

    You want to make the most of both portrait and landscape orientation (bigger digits in landscape?) and allow the orientation to be optionally "locked" when the countdown starts (because hey, you might be running and jumping behind rocks and trees and tumbling to dodge bullets).


    And general "count up" timing might be just as useful. Fewer bells and whistles though.

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Ahh, here's what I was thinking:

    Name:  sshot.jpg
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    "Defiance" (Season 1 episode 1, Volge attack scene)

    Probably elsewhere as well, "24" probably used the same thing.

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)


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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Quote Originally Posted by dee-u View Post
    I want to try Android programming but I want to tackle a worthy project, could you guys give me ideas?
    A simple project would be "detect how far you're from home". First - ask your user to store the gps coordinates for her home. Then turn on the GPS to determine where she currently is. Then tell them - how far she's from home.

    Also she can broadcast this to facebook / instagram chat / whatsapp or any other medium that she finds useful.
    Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to, you know, a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it has a computer in it. They should kill the people who made those things.- 'Woz'
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Quote Originally Posted by szlamany View Post
    How about helping me figure out how to decode JSON strings coming back from IIS web methods!

    Java is a huge pain!
    Quote Originally Posted by Merrion View Post
    That's one possible answer!
    Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to, you know, a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it has a computer in it. They should kill the people who made those things.- 'Woz'
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    MS SQL Powerposter szlamany's Avatar
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    The problem is decoding the JSON on the ANDROID device - not in .Net.

    IIS already handles turning the JSON into dictionary objects in the parameters of my .Net web methods.

    It's in the Android SDK/Java/C# world of the tablet that the JSON decoding is a problem.

    Although I've not tested it yet - this thread seem to have suggestions I can follow

    http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...oding-a-string

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    You keep bringing this up even though there are tons of options, from the SDK itself to 3rd party offerings:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9...son-in-android

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    MS SQL Powerposter szlamany's Avatar
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    I've paid a temp programmer here to test three different JSON libraries - all of these did not deal with the issues I laid out.

    My jQuery use of these same JSON feeds in a browser have no issue - that library handles it properly...

    With all that said - I figured I could ask the forum for experience in this regard.

    Have you tried any particular library and found that it could handle JSON decoding properly on an Android device??

    I'm assuming that my mix of IIS ASP.Net web methods and Android SDK is the problem - that's why I asked this question on this forum. I have also joined Android forums and posted the same question - no answer...

    For the purposes of the demo that is happening next Friday with this app, we are simply using hand-coded .REPLACE statements. I'm ok with that for a demo - but not when we are in production - it's just too much of a hack.

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Actually we looked at productivity enhancement, clients rejected the PhoneGap/HTML5 stuff as too crude, and ended up using Basic4Android for most development.

    As a result I haven't had to touch Java more than once in 6 months.

    So we're making a lot of use of the JSON library documented at http://www.basic4ppc.com/android/help/json.html

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    MS SQL Powerposter szlamany's Avatar
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Thank you for that info - after we get through the demo this week we will look at that link and see if a better JSON parser is available.
    Last edited by szlamany; Mar 29th, 2014 at 11:32 AM.

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Quote Originally Posted by szlamany View Post
    Thank you for that info - after we get through the demo this week we will look at that link and see if a better JSON parser is available.
    Didn't the library I mentioned in your thread work?
    Regards,


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    MS SQL Powerposter szlamany's Avatar
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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    Did not yet look at it - needed to get the app demo ready and the JSON issue was managed with .REPLACE statements. Got a lot of projects going on here - this Android one was kind of unexpected. When I got involved with this customer the plan was to use a browser on the Android device and connect to my existing web app. I happened to have a temp here that knew Android coding / SDK so I decided to move forward with an actual Android APP - so we created a 4GL for this baby.

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    Re: Worthy android project for beginner (not games)

    I'm already working on my first game using android java...Bosskillers. Just the intro and title so far, but the combination of Java, XML, and OpenGL....bring it on!!!

    So far its a perfect port. Believe it or not, majority if not 70% of the apps found in the Google Play market are games, even stupid ones that are easy to make, with ad banners which you can use directly from Google called AdMob to make ad revenue for your apps. Even easy to make flashlight apps you can have ads. The more apps you bust out, the more money you make. Just a thought

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