This week I spent some time working on Earlham CS’s Field Day Android application. It’s the app used by our student-faculty field science researchers to collect data on trips to, say, a glacier in Iceland. I made two substantial changes.
The first was updating our system dependencies. At the start of the summer, Field Day wasn’t a fully modern application. That’s mostly because its development is contingent on the interest levels of students and faculty who (correctly!) have other priorities during the academic year. We experience our only consistent spikes in development during preparation for a trip to Iceland. Even then, we tend to focus on adding or fixing features, rather than major design choices or boring updates. Whatever their benefits, such changes always risk eating up precious time in the short run.
As a result, we had long neglected to update SDK versions, themes, and other app fundamentals. I wanted to fix that before classes resumed this month.
Not being an Android expert (yet?), I relied on a mix of automated tools in Android Studio, manual code tweaks, and careful testing to push the update process forward. Here’s how I described it in my merge request:
I wanted to make us a “grownup” application, by which I mean that I wanted to move us away from as many deprecated tools and dependencies as possible, as far in advance of a field trip as possible. (EDIT: With one exception: these changes do not attempt to resolve the [looming] Google Drive [API] deprecation.)
To that end, this merge request involves substantial changes to build fundamentals like the Gradle version, as well as some Lint cleanup and general tidying. Much of it was done following a simple pattern:
– run a built-in Android Studio update tool (e.g. “Update to AppCompat”)
– change a bunch of details in the code so it builds
– test on the device
– lather, rinse, repeat
Field Day merge request 9
After some tests by myself and a colleague, I approved the merge.
To reward myself for accomplishing that admittedly tedious process (which followed a long, slow battery testing process), I did something more fun.
For a long time I’d wanted to improve Field Day’s UI to streamline the navigation. I made a batch of changes, then submitted the following merge request:
[Field Day’s original creative developers] created a great design palette for Field Day: fun fonts, bright colors, intuitive icons.
I wanted to keep that but update the navigation to reflect the current understanding of our usage model. To that end, this merge centralizes everything onto one screen, miniaturizes our less-used buttons, and puts database and sensors at the forefront.
No specific activities or fragments other than the main screen (and the deletion of the obsolesced sensor screen) have been changed.
I can foresee a future where we do more data analysis and aggregation through the lab notebook, so I’ve preserved the notebook icon for future use.
Field Day merge request 10
The changes in that request took us from this set of two main screens:
… to this one screen:
I again checked with my colleague and then approved the request. I’m now working on other issues and have already found the changes to be substantial boosts to the user experience.
This is a sample of my own personal work, but of course building software is a team sport. And it relies on iteration. The original designers of Field Day – current and former colleagues of mine – did a lot of the heavy lifting over a few years building the core logic and aesthetic of the app. As I made my changes in the last few months, I’ve worked to maintain their original design palette while improving usability, performance, and the underlying data model. It’s a useful, specialized, and dare I say fun application, and I want it to keep getting better.
As a closing note about process, I find it sharpens my skills development when I have to summarize my work into prose, as in these merge requests. Writing them requires more precision than a quick chat in a hallway. That’s to say nothing of possible benefits to future developers trying to retrace changes and intentions.