Dear students, Today we wrap up our course. Let’s recount what happened this semester. In week 1 we examined Kotlin, a language that many of us hadn’t used before—myself included. It seemed like the right thing to do, and that decision was recently validated by Android chief advocate Chet Haase at Google I/O: We’re announcing […]
Dear students, Today we will create an app called Two-Face that allows the user to take a split image on the front-facing camera. The left half and right half are taken at separate times. We will use the new CameraX API that was just announced at Google I/O. Before I forget, here’s your final TODO: […]
Dear students, Today we will create an app called Recog that presents anagrams for the user to unscramble. But instead of typing, the user will speak the answer. We’ll use Android’s speech recognition facilities to make this happen. Next lecture we will explore the new CameraX API that was just announced at Google I/O 2019. […]
Dear students, Today we will examine two common gestures that occur on mobile platforms: pinch-and-zoom and panning. We won’t create a full app, just a custom view that displays an image and supports these two gestures. First we’ll implement it by just adjusting the bounding rectangle containing the image. Once that works, we’ll switch transform […]
Dear students, Today we write an app that solves the problem of choosing of which player goes first in a game. All players place a finger on the phone, and the app chooses one of them randomly. The game is inspired by the commercial app Chwazi. Next lecture we will discuss writing an app that […]
Dear students, Today we write an app that allows multiple devices to play a single piano using Google’s Nearby API. One device serves as the host, running a third-party MIDI interpreter. (I use FluidSynth.) A client joins the host. The host device plays octave 4, and the client device plays octave 5. Next lecture we […]
Dear students, Today we write an app for hiding and finding messages in geographic locations. Our primary goal is to explore how to acquire and use a device’s location, and this app is just one playful example of the many possible applications that are aware of the user’s place. Next lecture we will discuss communicating […]
Dear students, Today we write Lonely Phone, an app that senses when the phone is laid flat and starts ringing to grab the user’s attention. This will be the first time we use the code you wrote outside of class and submitted through the Crowdsource tool. This makes me slightly nervous. When I control the […]
Dear students, Last time we met we tried something new. I assigned in-class exercises, you worked on them, and that’s all we had time for. We will discuss and implement your solutions today, which will wrap up our work on the Backlog app. I’d like to keep getting you involved in the writing of our […]
Dear students, We are back from a break. I hope you grew as a human being. I did, and I’m hoping to change things up a bit in this second half of the semester. The first half was largely me leading you on code adventures in lecture. I really don’t enjoy teaching in this tutorial […]