Just a Jump to the Left

Social media is such a strange thing to manage. My LJ will be going away soon, so I figured I might as well get settled in here. And no, I am not moving all my LJ content over here, but I will be posting here on a semi-regular basis.

Droid Me

Having been an Apple girl for quite a few years now, I am now facing the prospect of getting comfy with Android, both as a user and as a developer. It's been a bit rocky, but I'm slowly making progress.

Objective-C was so comfy for me, and Swift has surprised me by being even better. Java? I was never a fan. It's taken being forced to do some maintenance on an Android project, then being tasked with learning Xamarin (eek!) to get me over the don't-wanna's. Weirdly, having to work with Xamarin in C# has made it easier for me to approach Android development.

Right now I'm in the process of putting together an app to get into the app store as part of maintaining my developer portfolio. And this time I'm doing both an iOS and an Android version of the same app using Firebase as a back end service. (I got curious about it after attending a Google Dev event.) And no, I'm not using Xamarin for this project, although I might eventually do a Xamarin version just for the experience. I've been puttering about with it (mostly adjusting to Firebase) for about a month now in my spare time. The iOS version is at bare butt minimum viable. The droid version is about half way there after a major refactoring last night. (I predict at least two more rounds of refactoring before achieving Droid MVP.)

And you can tell I'm a developer because I've only had the sketchiest of thoughts as to the visual presentation.

Progress

Small amounts of progress this evening, but it's two steps forward, one step back. I am well and thoroughly tired of the Android debugger. And looking at the code to support sectioned list views... ugh. I think I'm just tired and need to do something completely different. Got date formatting today and handled some sequencing issues. The list views (aside from grouping) have gone fairly painlessly but there is something amiss in my detail view and I need to dig into the details of the debugger a little further to figure out what's going on there.

I've found using the debugger with Android Studio to feel inconsistent. Not sure if it's the debugger or a side effect of the way I'm using/abusing Firebase. Sometimes, in order to debug, I have to start the app and then attach the debugger to the running process instead of starting the debug directly.

Ok, I found a different description of how to accomplish the sectioned list view and it looks well written. I've bookmarked it to look at later, maybe after I've had some dinner.

Ug, I just remembered that I really need to upgrade my personal machine to Sierra. Maybe I can make that happen tonight. Tune in later for the further adventures.