Track Your Steps
Steps is a step tracker app which helps the user to track walking steps but also calories. Beyond its tracking functionalities, Steps can also navigate the user through its map feature.
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Purpose of the Application
In this day and age, most of the people do not have enough exercises to stay healthy because of time limits, places limits and so on. There is a practical need for the application, the ‘Steps’ provides a platform for these people to track walking steps, provides exercises feedbacks, and encourage them to walk more by competing with others.
Design Challenge
When the user opens the application for the first time, it will ask the user a set of questions to collect personal data. Then the system will generate customized walking steps for the user to complete on a daily basis. The application has two main functionalities, one is tracking walking steps and another one is to track running steps. The walking step is tracked automatically, and the running steps need to be activated manually whenever the user presses the button. Additionally, it has a walking step ranking page for every registered user, and it is intended to use competitions to encourage the user to do more exercises.
Log in screen and register screen.
My role
Steps is an individual assignment I created and designed in Android development class. It was made in three interations, and in each iteration, I used XML to structure the layout and wrote Java codes to implemnet the functionalities.
Milestone 1
Overview of the project
Steps will have a menu bar on the bottom of the application, and it has four buttons include ‘Today,’ ‘Run,’ ‘Rank,’ ‘Me.’ Whenever the user presses these buttons, they will bring the user to the corresponding page. The ‘Today’ page is for recording today’s walking steps and calculating other basic data like how many calories the user burned today. The ‘Run’ Page is designed to record the user’s running data include the duration, the distance and so on. The ‘Rank’ page is to display a ranking list for the user’s walking steps, and the list includes all the registered user. Finally, the ‘Me’ page is the place for the user to customize the settings for the application. Compare with other similar step tracker applications on the market, and it has extra features like track running steps which can avoid user to download another application to do the job whenever the user wants to running rather than walking. It comes with a customized walking plan for the user based on the personal information, it can help the user to lose weight more efficient compared with other similar applications, and that is why it is useful. It is also an interesting project because it has a ranking page for the registered user to compete with each other, the user will enjoy more the application if they compete with their friends, family members.
Basic Functionality
When the user logs in the application for the first time, it will ask the user to complete a set of questions to collect personal data in order to make a customized walking plan on a daily basis. The application has two activities at this stage which are todayActivity, runActivity. The todayActivity can do basic walking steps counting, calories calculation. The runActivity can be triggered whenever the user presses the button on the runActivity page. It can count the running duration, running distance, and it also can calculate calories.
Standard Functionality
It comes with two new activities which are rankActivity, meActivity. The rankActivity compare all the hard code users with the actual user in the rankActivity page, and the rank list should be refreshed every day. The meActivity is the place for user to change settings, profile. Moreover, the todayActivity will be implemented a new feature which is get weather information from other apps/websites. Lastly, the runActivity also will be implemented a new feature which navigates the user through google map while the user is running.
Bonus Functionality
At this stage, the meActivity will have a new feature which is showing multiple graphs based on the user’s progress and some hard code data. If I still have time, I will let the todayActivity send a notification to the user when it received weather warnings like “It is going to rain after 30 minutes”.
Milestone 2
Progress Report
At this stage, the application can handle registration, collecting personal data and login service. Moreover, the application can track walking steps, calculate burned calories and see the ranking status. It can also add events to the calendar, take profile pictures and log out the account.
Challenge
In the rankActivity of the application, I decided to use DialogFragment to do insert, search and remove actions instead of just adding them below the RecyclerView as buttons. The challenge I faced was I cannot get the values of two editText in my customized alertDialogFragment layout from the DialogFragment class. After I spent 2 hours of searching in the Stack Overflow, I found the link. One of the answers correctly solve my problem, I need to cast the DialogInterface object into Dialog object, then I can use the findViewById method to get two values.
TodayActivity, RunActivity, RankActivity, MeActivity
Relfection
There are two functionalities of the app were not accomplished as I expected. In the MeActivity, I planned to implement TextWatcher to check all the user input while the user is typing. In this way, the user can change their personal information and daily goals without crashing the app. Because I spent too much time for MeActivity’s camera functionality and I end up with no time to implement this feature. So I decided to change all the editable text to TextView in the MeActivity, the MeActivity became not a very practical practice for the user in the end. Lastly, the RankActivity did not implement the Comparator interface to compare the fake user data. I feel the reason why I did not achieve this feature is that my initial design of this activity is not very practical, there is no real user use my app and it does not make sense to compare all the fake user data. I tried to come with an alternative design for this activity, but I ran out of time. On the other hand, it's actually very complicated to implement a sort method to the SQLite database and takes lots of time.