CodeWerkz

That's right! A Sneak Preview of the upcoming, long wanted, Import and Export feature for Prompty!

Coming very soon

December 24th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

Just thought I would post the obligatory Christmas / New Year post and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Have a good week, see your family and party your socks off on New Years Eve!

During my spare time I will post some minor updates to Prompty and get the Import and Export logic understood but as you can guess I will be visiting friends and the like so I will be a bit busy.

Once again, have a good'n, be safe and enjoy the end of the decade!

December 21st, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

The new version of Prompty is finally here!

At the moment it is basically just an entire recode of the application and a new UI for the app. However in the next version I will push out the Import and Export feature which you will be able to use with the application I am designing for the Desktop which will also be released at the same time!

Here are some screenshots for you.

Presentation/Main screen:

Prompts

Prompter

About

Help

Settings

You can grab it from the Android marketplace by searching for "Prompty".

December 6th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

So I finally got off my ass and got it into gear to start and finish the majority of the new version of Prompty!

I've made a nice new interface for it so I thought I would show you some screenshots! Here you go...

As you can see, I have put some clocks on it to show if the Presentation is a timed one or not. Obviously it looks a bit pixelated as it is a screenshot but it looks nice on the physical device!

Can't wait to release it! Should be a week tops.

November 30th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

So I have been doing a lot of software development recently for an assignment I have at University and one thing I would like to share with you is my thoughts on Overriding the ToString method for most of your classes/objects that you create.

I think it is a very good idea to override it because you don't have to worry about creating a string, concatenating it with all the pulled properties and then output it. I'll show you an example.

Take an object of Name:

public class Name {
    // Fields
    private string _firstName;
    private string _lastName;
 
    // Constructor
    public Name(string fName, string lName)
    {
        _firstName = fName;
        _lastName = lName;
    }
 
    // Properties
    public FirstName { get { return _firstName; } }
    public LastName { get { return _lastName; } }
}

Now if you wanted to output that to a console and format it specifically as well, it could get a bit tedious:

public static void Main()
{
    // Create a new Name object.
    Name name = new Name("Charlie", "Baker");
 
    // Output it to a console.
    Console.WriteLine(name.FirstName + " " + name.LastName);
    // Outputs "Charlie Baker"
}

Now this is only a simple example and you could argue that it may not be needed due to the size of the object and its simplicity, however when you start creating more objects that incorporate each other then it can get a bit annoying to have to do this each time.

If we just override and add the ToString() method to the Name class, we can format it in there however we want and any classes that use it to output or write to the console can just output it how you want. This also makes it a lot easier to change how it is outputted later down the road if needed.

public override string ToString()
{
    return _firstName + " " + _lastName;
}

Now instead of formatting it in the main method, we can just output it and not have to worry about it:

public static void Main()
{
    // Create a new Name object.
    Name name = new Name("Charlie", "Baker");
 
    // Output it to a console.
    Console.WriteLine(name);
    // Outputs "Charlie Baker"
}

You can even go further and loop through a list and produce one string that can be outputted simply and easily without having to have special display methods for that particular class.

November 6th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

So as you can probably see, there hasn't been much activity over here lately! This is mainly due to University and the never ending increasing amount of work that I have to do. Just got my first assignment for Software Development so should be pretty fun as it is one of the aspects of Computing that I like (Versus other areas such as Systems Analysis).

I have also got to find a placement for next year as part of my course! Lots of writing CV's, Cameos and Job searching! Fun!

In other news my legs are finally starting to get a bit stronger to cope with the amount of cycling I have been doing compared to doing almost no exercise for a good few years. Helps that I have to go to Uni atleast 3 or 4 times a week and there are some really steep slopes that knacker me out at the moment. I am aiming to eventually cycle back to Essex on a 160 mile journey. Would be quite an experience.

October 18th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

Just published a small app, Temperature Converter. Just something I made during an all nighter session. Made in roughly 2 hours.

Development for the new version of Prompty carries on. Probably around 60% complete from a release. Should be released in the next few weeks.

September 29th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

Right well that has been a rocky two weeks. Lots of stuff has happened!

Firstly I moved into a new house for University and had no Internet for a 1.5 weeks until Virgin Media came and installed it aswell as my main Desktop computer being broken for the same amount of time. Apparantly the Power Supply had died. That week pretty much consisted of watching a ton of films with my housemate and trying to keep ourselves occupied until everything had been sorted out.

Well it's all done now so I have now began working on the version 2 of Prompty! Complete recode. I will issue one more update to fix a few issues aswell as support for Simplified Chinese aswell as Traditional Chinese.

Until then, chow!

September 21st, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

Ok this is just a quick update, can't do much at the moment on anything as my computer has died and waiting on a new motherboard as well as having no proper internet access till mon 14th when virgin media install it.

September 5th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »

So just a bit of news really...

Got my first donation for Prompty today! A big thank you to Andrew who donated Glad you like the application

Been a bit busy the last few days sorting stuff out for Uni and relaxing a bit from coding to ready up my energy tomorrow.

I think the plan I have is to add the last few features, mainly the Background and Text Color changing for the Prompt section to take it up to v2.0 and then afterwards start refactoring the code.

Over the development I have learnt a LOT about Java, Android, Best Practices, Optimisations and the like and will put all that I have learnt into produced a new version which is faster, more robust and cleaner to maintain.

Anyway that is just the news for now...

August 26th, 2009 - No Comments - Read Article / Comment »