Statman III: Three Entries and I'm Already Done

The afternoon after my last post I had planned to do work on this a bit more and finish it over the week. I ended up working until 2 a.m., stopping only to eat occasionally pace around frantically. I'm really happy with how it turned out.




Github


I started with the layout. I found a nice hockey themed phone wallpaper to use as my background. I loved the look of semi-transparent cards, so I was excited to use them on my own app. I replaced my custom list items with a custom card item. And I mostly just copied the code from Enemies, but these were a lot simpler. It was important  to me that the characters were readable, so I tweaked those a bit to get them where they are. The pictures, I think, add some color to the app, and they're accentuated further by the greyscale background.


Data persistence, was my next priority. I used Gson to convert my Player objects into a json string. Then I saved that with sharedpreferences. This was done in the activity's onPause method so that the stats would be saved anytime the app is no longer visible. Previously the onCreate method contained a declaration of a new arrayList that contains all my Players. I replaced this with a call of my method pullData(), which checks the sharedPrefs for data, and retrieves it if it exists, or instantiates a new ArrayList if there's not data within sharedPrefs.

The pictures above demonstrate some stat sorting, a feature that I definitely wanted to implement. A user can press the stat category and sort the list by that category. I thought about this quite a bit before I even started working on the app, and I really wasn't sure how I'd do it. I guess the issue was that even if I could compared the properties of the Player objects, I didn't know how to sort my list by this comparison. I worked out how I'd do it in my head, and after a bit of research on Comparators, I figured out how to translate my idea into code.

At that point, I thought I was done, but the Points stat bothered me. It shouldn't be user edited, it should change automatically as goals and assists change. This was actually much harder than I though it would be. The TextView representing a stat only changes when the OK button is pressed on my dialog. The issue it that the method tied to that button is only references the text that has been touched. I tried a bunch of different things, but I ended up creating an additional version of that method that takes the points TextView as a parameter.

App Breakdown

This is a pretty simple application, it keeps track of the stats of a game my friends and I play. Each player is represented by their picture. Every stat, except for Points can manually edited via a +/- dialog; the Points stat updates automatically. Each category on the title bar can be pressed and it sorts it ascending or descending order. The statistics are saved every time the app is paused and saved data, if it exists, is pulled up whenever the app it opened.

Most Annoying Part

Hands down, the title bar. It took me at least an hour to get those letters in the right position. I had to do it through trial and error, and needed to run the app on my device because the display in Android Studio wasn't completely accurate. It seems like the visual aspect of apps, is something I always get hung up on. I spend lots of time trying to get certain views to look exactly the way I want.

Part I'm Most Proud of

The data persistence is not something I've ever used in one of my own apps before. I've used it plenty in apps I made with the help of textbooks and online courses, but when it came to my own ideas, the concepts I learned didn't exactly translate. I looked at some other people's apps that were close to what I wanted and it all seems so complicated. The prospect of saving data seemed daunting. But, as I mentioned before, this app in particular was really motivating for me. I wanted to finish it so I dove right in. I did little research(a lot) on Gson and sharedPreferences, and some toying around with test methods in my apps. After a while, I knew how to get it done and all of the things(most of the things) that seemed so complicated before, I understand now.




I might try to clean up the code a bit. I think I did a pretty good job, but there are probably things that I could do better. But unless my friends find bugs, I'm pretty much done with this.