teaching machines

U and I: Chris Sippel

September 21, 2012 by . Filed under cs491 mobile, fall 2012, postmortems.

Starting Strength App
The purpose of this app is to act as a calculator for warm up sets when lifting weights. It was designed around Mark Rippetoe’s(his face is the icon) Starting Strength Program but can be used for any program. The basic function is that a user enters in the starting weight (weight of the bar usually) and the ending weight then the program calculates the plates needed at each side of the barbell for each set. Then I added some extra features like the ability to have 4 different Lifts in memory at once, and the ability to label each one. Also I added the ability to allow the user to define the different weight plates that are available to them at time of calculation.
Widgets(Main Activity)
7 Button widgets
12 Text Views
3 EditText boxes
(Plate Definition Activity)
7 TextView
7 Checkboxes
Lessons learned:
I know fully understand how to pass information between activities, even if the methods I used to do so weren’t the most efficient way of doing it. Also have a much better understand of intents and how they are used. I also have a much better understand of how to get the layouts to do what I want. It took a decent amount of fiddling to get them nested and spaced properly.