Aditya Kaushik : My Android App Development Journey
It all started when my friend showed me an android app that just shows “Hello World” and I was like whoa!, How did you do that? (At that time I only knew basic ‘C’, he motivated me too! ) That ‘hello world’ makes me fascinated and after seeing that I also wanted to make that app. I googled it, got a ton(s) of information and I crossed my way from Udacity, learned the Android basics.
After having some experience in android, One fine day, while sitting in the class, my phone rang and that gave me an idea to make an app that automatically makes my phone to go to silent mode. I google about that, found loads of information, but at that time I only knew a little android, so it was getting very difficult to go through it, but any how I find a similar course on Udacity and I was fascinated by the Information it provided.
I got to know about Google Places API, location API and various other relevant APIs. Finally, I made my first android app.
Let me give you a brief introduction about this app.
By using Google places API, I let the user mark the places at where he wants his phone to go on silent mode, but not everyone wants the phone to go to silent mode right? So there is this feature where User can choose from Vibration or Silent mode at defined places.
The user sees the Address of the places in the app that he has selected, even coordinates too!, but some of us wants to name the place, like (College, Office etc),
And this feature is my favourite in the app. The user has the choice to name the place according to him.
This app is tailored for you and will work just like you want it to work. Although this app is not 100% complete and it will never be!
Those were some good points about the app, Now let me tell you there are some serious issues too like it uses a little bit of more battery, and I will fix that soon!
What difficulties I faced and What I learned.
- The first one is Motivation, While developing this app I lost my interest and I left this app, but my senior Himanshu Dixit asked me to write a blog post, bingo, I got motivated again.
- As writing code all by myself, I found I am very weak in some of my concepts, I got to learn them again but this makes me more confident!
- I was totally dependent on video lectures, but the text is damn good! The Android guides notes by code path are just awesome, and also the Android documentation is just wow.
- Studying new things, as what I knew was very little!
I got to know about debugging, as that part is very frustrating if not done correctly. - I learned about VCS. VCS like git plays a very important role in a developer’s life.
Doing your own project, not only makes you motivated but also doing that teaches you a lot than anyone can!
The source code of this app lives on this GitHub repo, I would be more than happy if you go and run that app and give me any kind of feedback!
Although this app is complete but one more and important feature is remaining, and it will be completed soon! Reporting an Issue or contributing to above code is appreciated.
