Week 1 Accomplishments

      This week was the first week of actually starting to work on my semester project. I had been researching some information over the past couple of weeks, but I actually got started with some design stuff this week. On my Gantt chart that I created for this project, I decided that this week, I would get started on the database part of the app and with designing what I wanted the pages of the app to look like.

      For the database part of the app, I created a table for the user which will hold the user's NUID, first name, last name, Loper email, and estimated date of graduation. There is also a table for holding the traditions for the app, and the fields in that table are the tradition number, tradition name or title, tradition description, and the tradition instructions for how to complete it. There is also a table that joins the student and tradition tables, and it has the student's NUID, the tradition number, the date the tradition was completed, and the photo that the student took. We might include some sort of calendar in the app, so I also have a table that will hold upcoming alumni events that the users could go to, since the app is for UNK's alumni association. Another table is for the number of traditions that a student has completed. We are not sure exactly what prize a students would get for completing a certain amount of traditions, but this table would keep track of what type of prize the student would receive and how many traditions would have to be completed first. The there would be another adjoining table between this one and the student table with the student's NUID, the number of traditions that was completed to get to this step, and the date that that level was reached.

      I have also started working on drawing what I think the pages should look like, and I will include those images at the bottom of this post. The designs and layout for the app are based on a couple of other tradition apps I have looked at. It will hopefully be fairly simple and easy to use for the user. The designs will eventually vary a little between Android and iOS, but for now, they appear the same. The biggest design differences will probably be more with functionality of the app rather than appearance.

For today and next Monday, I am going to work on setting up the IDE's for developing the app and make sure I know how to user them. I am planning on using Android Studio for the Android app, and I think I am going to use XCode for the iOS app. I am going to look into XCode more over the weekend, but first I need to get access to XCode on the Macs in the school lab.

Pictures of my designs I drew. Right now they do not have any color, but I imagine that the main color on them will be Loper blue.