Dateline 12-18-2016

Yesterday ended up being pretty productive, especially for it being the weekend. I have a large chunk of the structure of my latest Android app assignment laid out to where it's functional when using a test target site to filter information from. Now I just need to tweak the code to handle the true target content and figure out how to display the information that is pleasing to the end user.

The assignment is to create a news app that takes information from a news site and then displays articles based on setting options selected by the user. So if the user wants to see nothing but Tech News they can going into settings tab, make their choice and viola, all they will get is tech news. 

Most of the stuff I have to do in this assignment was covered in the assignment only in the last assignment we used a search field to find books based on specific search terms. What's new here is the use of the settings tab which triggers a drop down with preselected options.

I should be able to do this in an afternoon but it is my Sunday and I am only feeling half inspired. Though I can see the benefits of being able to create a settings tab, this app is so simple, feature wise, that I don't feel like I will be wowing anyone with my outcome which isn't all that exciting when one of my main goals is to create a compelling portfolio. 

That's my own hang-up though. No matter what I'm going to need to go back through all of the apps that I have built through this course to either clean up the code to meet the professional practices that I've learned over time or implement features that were not the focus at the time of creation. 

Hopefully, I'll be able to get all the functionality figured out by the end of today and tomorrow I will work on the design. Then again, it is Sunday which I still want to work on making my official day off so I may just shift things over by a day, but I did lose all of Thursday to sleep and slacked away Friday so this mandatory "me" day hasn't really been earned.

Oh well, we'll see what happens, and always I'll keep you posted when/if it does.

Talk to you tomorrow,

The Wicker Breaker