Inspiration
A college project which had some technical conditions to meet in development but the challenge was simple... make an awesome App! I then thought about my travelling in the US and how I wished I had a better idea of the city I was visiting. In addition, when I reached that city, I wanted to stop spending a half to full day getting research done before I actually did something other then go to my hotel and wonder what I was going to do with the rest of my stay!
How it works
It's designed for national and international vistors with a main welcome screen that has some fun features on it including country facts, weather forecasts through an embedded Accuweather site and buttons to take the user to the City Picker screen where the information on cities is choosable (13 cities in this release) and also to the SMS message screen where a default text or modified text can be SMS'd to numbers manually inputted or from the contact picker.
Challenges I ran into
Validation of the manual number input screen was a chore given the limitations of the App inventor "is a number?" block in math cabinet. The variants I ran on the validation of this field took me 2 days to finalise a reasonable validation of the telephone number field. On a call with App Inventor team at MIT in Boston, I suggested the "is a number?" field (dynamic TryParse) have extra blocks such as "telephone validation" and "number validation" to add to the "is a number?" block so the operators on the android numeric keypad are excluded bar "+" for the telephone number field and included for the number field making validation of numbers and telephone numbers much easier.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Validating the telephone number field, developing an Application that is a useful concept developed by myself and not copied/modified from the App inventor tutorials. It's my first freelance end to end project completed on my own. I have more concepts I want to develop and I find this exciting for the future. I also want to replicate my end to end concept to application Apps for Windows Mobile, iOS and in time Ubuntu.
What I learned
Patience is a virtue, best development happens when you are keeping your build in stages (unit test the lot) and recording of datasets for inputs should happen on external savable resources like spreadsheets, etc. Data integrity, order of loading and setting into the App can go horribly wrong, so best have a process that allows you to relook or rollback to checked and validated datasets to fields via a spreadsheet.
What's next for Travel Pack
More cities, introduction of map features and extension of location sensor to measure distance and allow route suggestions to desired cities. Addition of twitter plugin and fusion tables to augment the SMS abilities making the App more social is also being considered.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.