ThoughtBox (Mobile Web) – Andy Hurd
ThoughtBox is an app to log thoughts, perhaps otherwise known as a non-diary. Okay, it’s more or less a diary/journal. It allows for several users to use the app via a login that allows users to only navigate to their own entries. At the login screen, the new users can be added and once logged in, the app retrieves all of that particular user’s entries. This was done using PhoneGap’s database plugin to create a database, and then insert and retrieve user and post records.
While building this application, I feel like I became much more comfortable with javascript than ever before, and probably learned some important modern web practices as well. I also learned that phonegap provides an awesome array of plugins that, at first glance, I am not quite sure what to do with other than to abstract away hours of development (which is OK), but I think this feeling might just stem from the thought that it seems difficult to mesh html and these functionalities into a cohesive app. This makes me think it sometimes may be useful to use Phonegap to more easily pull data from the device than it would be natively, but then send that information back into a Java-driven app. However, moving to web languages for layouts and design overall made me more comfortable and I really enjoyed the functional and asthetic potential that this freedom and jquery-mobile’s built-in feaures offer.
Below is the ‘add user’ page showing some form validation, the ‘view posts’ page that links to all posts and groups by day, and the ‘view post’ page which allows users to view a submitted post.
