This week I’ve changed gears completely.
I’ve spent all my time for months working on how to store timetables compactly and then how to retrieve the data again correctly and quickly. I also did some of that this week, notably I implemented calendar exceptions. Before, if a trip runs say monday to friday except on christmas and new year I would get the monday to friday bit right, it wouldn’t show up on weekends, but I was ignoring the christmas and new year exceptions and would show it as if it ran there too. Not anymore since this week though, that has now been fixed. I also finished stop clustering and it seems to be working just like you’d expect.
Finally, I spent some more time working on making updates smaller and picked some more low-hanging fruit there. At this point stops that haven’t changed basically cancel out and take hardly any space in the updates but trips still don’t cancel out right. I have a number of ideas for how to fix that, I’ve tried the easiest of them and they didn’t work, but I have some that will take more work but that I’m confident will do the trick.
Most of the week though I’ve been working on designing the user interface for the android app. I have literally no experience in android app design so I’ve spent a lot of time watching instruction videos where super friendly and helpful people have told me all about the tools and methods for that kind of thing. And in-between I’ve started working on the design. It’s a lot of work and I’m learning as I’m going but I’m enjoying it and I’m not unhappy with that I’ve ended up with so far. It’s really super motivating to see the actual app take shape, not just the placeholder stuff I’ve been using to test the data. Even if the final version probably won’t look anything like these first drafts.
Next week should be more of the same, more videos and design, and I plan to start implementing the designs as well.
