Today is the last day of my pairing tour before I start my apprenticeship challenges. It feels bittersweet to have gone through this apprenticeship and learned so much during my time here. I will soon be tested on my new found knowledge of Software Craftsmanship.
However, today I finished off my pairing tour on the same Android project as I worked on yesterday. This time I was doing more UI Styling, which is something that I haven't really gotten much time to work with, so I'm glad to finally get some experience with it.
So what my pair and I worked a bit on was creating a new Activity for the app that shows an overview of what the user can do once they have signed up. In Android, there's a concept called layouts, which is a structuring View elements, such as text boxes, buttons, etc. Layouts contain View elements and you can nest different layouts to position certain view elements on a layout. The way you add styles to layouts are similar to CSS and HTML, but pretty much everything is in XML format. Like CSS, you can add margins, padding, change the size of text, or many other things.
The problem of designing a UI for mobile is that you have to consider usability and how the UI will work on various devices that have different screens. At first things were going pretty well with styling, we were following the mockups that were given to us to go by, and we were testing our layouts on a rather big device - a Samsung galaxy tablet. However, when we tried our layout in landscape mode on a smaller Samsung phone, our layout wasn't usable. We had a button that couldn't be visible because other view elements took too much of the layout space. So we had to make the button below all the view elements and allow the user to scroll through some information to get to the button that will navigate to the next activity layout. We did have some frustations, but eventually after fighting with some positioning elements we got everything in order.
All in all throughout my apprenticeship and working closely with other pairing I have learned so much about how to create software professionally in an organized manner. I look forward to applying all that I have learned throughout my apprenticeship and take my journey to mastery forward.
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