I've just about finished editing my code and cleaning it up.  Tomorrow I have my "defense", a meeting with my professors in which we discuss many of the decisions I've made throughout the semester.  We also assess the effectiveness of my code and design.  After that, I have to finish final documentation and submit it to the correct place.  This was an enjoyable experience and I still plan to work on my project, but I'm also ready to move on to the next big thing!

My presentation last Monday went much better than expected.  I think I gave a simple yet thorough presentation.  There weren't any crashes during the demo time either luckily.  All in all I was pleased with my performance and I thought everyone else did a really great job too.  Now I've started to clean up my code a bit and do some documentation.  This includes converting "spaghetti code" into functions, getting rid of unused variables, and verifying that the app still works after I've made a couple changes.  After that, I'll need to work on this website a bit and add some more information.  I'm not totally done yet, but things are wrapping up!

As I expected, I got a little bit lazy towards the end of the capstone process.  Being a senior close to the end of college doesn't help my work ethic one bit... However, I've worked really hard on development for the last week or so and I feel pretty good about what I'm presenting today.  Unfortunately I didn't hit all of my requirements which I think was a mixture of laziness/lack of time as well as unrealistic/unneeded requirements.  For instance, using the phone's accelerometer to move on to the next lift in a workout was unrealistic.  Working with the accelerometer is difficult in itself, but then I also got many false positives from different gestures like tapping on the phone or even walking around in the gym.  Therefore, I had to scrap it for now.  While I missed the mark on a couple of things, I think I also delivered on many of my goals like delivering a clean UI.  I will continue to make modifications after my presentation today.

I was able to make some progress last week including getting my "fragments" to work as well as return some functionality back to my app such as saving/loading workouts and starting those workouts.  Overall I think the app is looking better than it did before.  Sure, starting over slowed me down but I think it was worth it.  This week I will be hitting it hard and adding as much functionality as I can.

Well, I just spent about 6 hours at the lab trying to solve a problem I was having.  I didn't have any success.  Some would say that I wasted 6 hours, but I'm trying to think of it as I spent 6 hours learning how not to solve my problem.  That way, I'm ahead tomorrow by 6 hours!  In all seriousness, I made things way more difficult for myself than I needed to for the sake of a super clean interface.  It's hard now but it will be worth it!

This week I essentially "started over" regarding my project.  This wasn't the smartest call being halfway through the semester but I wasn't very happy with how my app was looking.  One of my key goals was to make an app that is incredibly easy and intuitive to use and I felt I was failing at that.  Therefore I started a new project and started my redesign.  Now, my app has tabs at the bottom of the screen that let the user get to different parts of the app very quickly.  This sounds like a simple change on the surface but in reality it took weeks to get to where I was before I decided to make this change.  On another note, the other students and I have to give a "walkthrough" of our project this week.  Therefore I am trying to get as much functionality in as possible before Thursday of this week.  I will post an update on the blog before Thursday regarding my progress!

This week's update is a little more boring than my past updates.  Basically all I did this week was fix some bugs and add some more screens to my app - I have almost all of them added and looking how I want so I will start adding real functionality within a week or less I think which is exciting.  Nothing much else to report this time but I'll have a new update soonish!

While it's far from finished, my user interface is starting to take some shape.  I want to really reduce the amount of words on screen at one time but this is a general idea of how I would like the app to look.  I wanted some way for the user to see the week "at a glance" to plan ahead. When one of the days of the week is clicked on the left side, the right side of the screen will display the workout for that day (just hard to show in a screenshot).  I also wanted some quick stats from the previous workout that was completed.  I also spent some time on my create workout screen which allows the user to make their own workouts.  It's not very polished at the moment but it's nice to see a visual representation of all the work I've done on the app so far.

It's small, but my big breakthrough this week was finally being able to add my own customized settings to the setting screen.  I can now get rid of the default settings (general, notifications, data sync) and replace them with something more meaningful (fitbit settings, personal settings, goals, etc).  On another note, it's looking like it's going to be either very difficult or impossible to have real-time heart rate data on the app.  So I should be able to still have a heart rate summary at the end of a workout, but it doesn't look like there will be any real time feedback.  This is on Fitbit's end.  Either way, I am continuing to flesh out how the app will look while also adding basic functionality.

So it took me about a week... but I finally have circles showing up on my app!  Everything else is barebones right now simply for testing.  I'm a happy camper for tonight.