We’ve begun work on the new $FieldScience Android application! This application is yet to be named, but what do people think of the name FieldDay? I think it’s snappy. 🙂 I created a shell in Android Studio and pushed the code to our Gitlab repo. All of the developers have been able to checkout the code locally to their machines. The old application has been archived and made read-only in Gitlab.

The current developers of the application — Nic, Charlie, and myself — met last week to discuss the details of the application. During the meeting we discussed the basic outline of what we want the application to do. There will be ‘skins’ for each sensor, and all of those will interact with a basic communications library that is built to interact with all of the sensors that we have. There are many things that the old application — Seshat — did well and we discussed those and the pieces of code we want to keep — camera option on sensor skins, writing to csv, sending to database. Android applications have very particular states and processes that they go through. Through some research, we have figured out that they way our old application handled those could have been part of the problem with it crashing a lot. There is still more research to be done in that area, because we don’t fully understand it but we are getting closer.

We are not going to focus on the aesthetics of the application right now, but we did decide that we liked the front/main screen of the old app and will keep it. I’ve added that to the new application with a few enhancements. I made the skins circles and made the colors stand out more. You can see the difference and changes below (Seshat is on the left, new application on the right). Prettier, don’t you think?