As the video below says, this week was almost exclusively working on android. It’s tricky, I’ve never done anything on android before so I’m learning as I go and I make mistakes and have to change stuff I’ve already done all the time, but I’m making progress.
One thing I worked on was making data access faster. It used to be that from the time you clicked the location button to the nearest stops showed up there was a delay of like 3 seconds. This was because the app loaded everything before it was able to access anything. Now instead of having the data together in a single file that has to be read in one go I’ve split it into a number of separate files in a zip archive that I can read out individually. So now, to show the stop list I only have to read the geographic index and the stops information and not the schedules themselves. And longer term I can split things even further so I only have to read some of the geographic info and stops.
I also added an action if you click a stop, you now go to a stop info view. It doesn’t show anything but it will. Just this took a lot of time because now having two views instead of one revealed some bad decisions I’d made last week that I had to fix.
Another thing I worked on was reading calendars – that’s the “monday to friday except public holidays” aspect – so now those are available to the app as well, though I don’t use them yet.
I’ve realized that I probably have to include maps in the app as well, and they have to work offline as well so I can’t just rely on google maps they probably have to be my own set of maps. That could potentially end up taking a lot of space if I don’t simplify them and I want them to be simple and stylized like transit maps usually are. I played around with some ideas for how to those automatically but so far it’s not been a success. My attempt to make a compressed version of Fyn that looks less pixelated than just a bitmap when you zoom in wasn’t a total disaster but yeah… it’s not production ready.
This week I want to show a departure board on the stops info page. It may not be correct – I may not take calendars into account yet for instance – but I’d like to show something.
