Just a short post because it’s late. Today was a bit frustrating, mostly trying to do minor things, but the result feels like a fairly big breakthrough, and the app is now doing what it was originally intended to do, albeit in a very rough form.
Today’s Results
The main result today was that I can now search for locations and display them on the camera view. It’s really starting to come together now.
The only thing that remains for this part of the app is to do a bit more with these overlays so that they’ll line up correctly with buildings at different angles and distances. This is mostly just maths that is going to take some thinking about, but the basis of the application is mostly there now.
A few pictures for now:
The first 2 are searching for the local Tesco’s, before I added search boxes there. Not particularly descriptive pictures considering I can’t actually see those locations from here. But, you can see that there are -some buildings- over there in the distance. And just for proof, here’s some map view shots to confirm.
So you can see I am indeed facing Tesco, and you can just about tell that I’m standing in that place from the map - you can see the power line going through the garden.
A lot of the day was spent screwing around with XML and views trying to get the search box on the camera view, and changing them to image buttons. I got it in the end though.
I’m pretty excited at the progress I’ve made, and how close it feels to the end now. I just need to do some maths-foo, and then this section is done. After that I plan on making my own server application for adding locations too, but that shouldn’t be too complex. Then I just need to make it so that it can be sent search queries, and output the result in the same JSON format that I’m already dealing with for Google.
I’ll post some code bits tomorrow, though there’s not too much to see beside the calculations for displaying the markers on the screen.
Tomorrow’s goal
I’ll be going in to town to test it out some. I’d like to try and implement some of the maths to calculate the height, and varying positions depending on the distance, but I think that’s mostly going to be down to trial and error.
Links of the Day
Only one really. Most of the day was just testing stuff, and combating the NullPointerExceptions that they resulted in
http://mylifewithandroid.blogspot.com/2008/04/custom-views.html
Fairly simple explanation of how to make your own custom views and put them into the XML file.
