Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 1:17-2:30
Thursday: 1:50-2:30
Friday: 1:17-2:30
This week is my last week in the internship. I have started working on making the app work offline by writing information to a file when connected to a network so it can be used when not connected. However, in order to do that, I need to use PHP because javascript and HTML and python cannot write to files. There have been issues running PHP in Aptana. Once those were solved and PHP began running correctly, our database has stopped working. I have no idea what could have happened to the database. I have even commented out all reference to PHP to see if that was the issue, but nothing has solved it yet. So, I haven't gotten very far with the PHP because I cannot connect to the database, which is required. I've also added some aesthetics like labels for buttons. Currently, though, I am most concerned with the fact that the parts of the app that were working perfectly are no longer working. Until these issues are fixed, I'm not sure where to continue.
Monday, May 18, 2015
May 4-8
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:55-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started testing and adding aesthetics to the aspects of the app. I have been able to set up a server to test on in school that will allow me to test the app on my phone to make sure that the formatting is done properly for mobile devices. So, most of my time is spent looking over code, testing, and making adjustments. I also finished the notifications area of the app. My newest edition only shows notifications that are still relevant. For example, if notifications are not deleted the day after they were planned for, they will not be shown even though they are detected by the app.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:55-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started testing and adding aesthetics to the aspects of the app. I have been able to set up a server to test on in school that will allow me to test the app on my phone to make sure that the formatting is done properly for mobile devices. So, most of my time is spent looking over code, testing, and making adjustments. I also finished the notifications area of the app. My newest edition only shows notifications that are still relevant. For example, if notifications are not deleted the day after they were planned for, they will not be shown even though they are detected by the app.
Above is a screenshot of the home screen of the app from the view on a laptop.
Friday, May 8, 2015
April 27-30
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
What an exciting week! The app is really coming along and I think we will be able to have the first version for intensive testing by the end of the school year. I've added the notifications to the app that will show two hour delays and closings. I also started to add some aesthetic effects like color coding for some of the tables, like the list of clubs. My colleague and I decided to manually enter the clubs into the database for the time being because we still do not have control of the high school website to change the formatting of the data we need to scrape and the clubs don't change too drastically from year to year. We have now started to throw around ideas for what to add and what needs to be improved since most of the aspects of the app are finished. We might try to find extraneous issues of the school newspaper to put online and subsequently be scraped. We also have some issues with logging onto the app, some of the graphics, and viewing pdf's that need to be looked into. My colleague is still finishing the map, but he is making good progress. I am going to start looking into the logic errors we are having listed above and letting others test it. Hopefully we will be able to test using PhoneGap in school in the near future so that it will be easier for others to test.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
What an exciting week! The app is really coming along and I think we will be able to have the first version for intensive testing by the end of the school year. I've added the notifications to the app that will show two hour delays and closings. I also started to add some aesthetic effects like color coding for some of the tables, like the list of clubs. My colleague and I decided to manually enter the clubs into the database for the time being because we still do not have control of the high school website to change the formatting of the data we need to scrape and the clubs don't change too drastically from year to year. We have now started to throw around ideas for what to add and what needs to be improved since most of the aspects of the app are finished. We might try to find extraneous issues of the school newspaper to put online and subsequently be scraped. We also have some issues with logging onto the app, some of the graphics, and viewing pdf's that need to be looked into. My colleague is still finishing the map, but he is making good progress. I am going to start looking into the logic errors we are having listed above and letting others test it. Hopefully we will be able to test using PhoneGap in school in the near future so that it will be easier for others to test.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
April 20-24
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-1:47
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week I worked on notifications for two hour delays and school closings in the app. I started with an animation of the icon for notifications on the home screen. I made it so that if there was an unviewed notification, the icon (a bell) would "ring" twice and an exclamation point would appear in the corner of the icon. Then, when all notifications were viewed, but there are still present notifications, the exclamation point stays but the bell does not ring. Next, I worked on adding the lunch menu to the app. I scraped the menu from the district website, stored the data in our database in HTML by day, and then printed each day in weeks of five school days. When making the lunch menu, I had to change some icons around. Previously, I had made the icon for the clubs a club sandwich. However, now that lunch menus are a part of the app, it would make a lot more sense to have the lunches be represented by a sandwich. So, I switched out those images and made a new image for the clubs. While I was at it, I made an icon for the map that my colleague has been working on. Then, I worked on fitting the icon into the home screen along with the existing icons. The bell is the 7th icon to be added to the home screen and since I laid the screen out in two columns, the bell would not fit well into the layout. So, I put it in the top right corner of the home screen and formatted. This brings me very near to the completion of the app. I have to complete the notifications section, but after that, the only thing left to do is add the map and test. That is, unless we want to spend more time making it more aesthetically pleasing. I may eventually start doing that, however since it is not possible to test on a phone in school, it will be hard to do any of that during my internship period.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-1:47
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week I worked on notifications for two hour delays and school closings in the app. I started with an animation of the icon for notifications on the home screen. I made it so that if there was an unviewed notification, the icon (a bell) would "ring" twice and an exclamation point would appear in the corner of the icon. Then, when all notifications were viewed, but there are still present notifications, the exclamation point stays but the bell does not ring. Next, I worked on adding the lunch menu to the app. I scraped the menu from the district website, stored the data in our database in HTML by day, and then printed each day in weeks of five school days. When making the lunch menu, I had to change some icons around. Previously, I had made the icon for the clubs a club sandwich. However, now that lunch menus are a part of the app, it would make a lot more sense to have the lunches be represented by a sandwich. So, I switched out those images and made a new image for the clubs. While I was at it, I made an icon for the map that my colleague has been working on. Then, I worked on fitting the icon into the home screen along with the existing icons. The bell is the 7th icon to be added to the home screen and since I laid the screen out in two columns, the bell would not fit well into the layout. So, I put it in the top right corner of the home screen and formatted. This brings me very near to the completion of the app. I have to complete the notifications section, but after that, the only thing left to do is add the map and test. That is, unless we want to spend more time making it more aesthetically pleasing. I may eventually start doing that, however since it is not possible to test on a phone in school, it will be hard to do any of that during my internship period.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
April 14-17
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week I finished the news section of the app. I made a menu out of the previous news page that would condense the school newspaper and school news into one menu that led to those individual pages, thus getting rid of one of the icons in the home menu. This was necessary due to my inability to draw a good icon in MS Paint that represented the school newspaper and because there would be far too many icons if each section of the app had its own on the home page. The school news section is now branched off from the overall news menu, which shows all of the titles of news stories. These titles are all buttons that lead to the full news story. I worked a lot on formatting the stories so that new paragraphs were recognized by the HTML, meaning I had to make a new <p> tag every time a "\n" escape sequence was found in the string of the story. I also worked on some formatting of all of the pages, like the background color and the appearance of tables used to display the different scraped information. Next, I will look at making a place for all of my colleague's code to go. The mapping algorithm will need its own icon and page, so I will make that next week as well as looking into alerts for school closings. Another member of Byte Club had previously made a short program that would allow the superintendent of the school to add entries to our database when a 2 hour delay, early dismissal, or closing occurred. So, I will work on gathering this information from the database, alerting the user, and adding a page to display all of those notifications.
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week I finished the news section of the app. I made a menu out of the previous news page that would condense the school newspaper and school news into one menu that led to those individual pages, thus getting rid of one of the icons in the home menu. This was necessary due to my inability to draw a good icon in MS Paint that represented the school newspaper and because there would be far too many icons if each section of the app had its own on the home page. The school news section is now branched off from the overall news menu, which shows all of the titles of news stories. These titles are all buttons that lead to the full news story. I worked a lot on formatting the stories so that new paragraphs were recognized by the HTML, meaning I had to make a new <p> tag every time a "\n" escape sequence was found in the string of the story. I also worked on some formatting of all of the pages, like the background color and the appearance of tables used to display the different scraped information. Next, I will look at making a place for all of my colleague's code to go. The mapping algorithm will need its own icon and page, so I will make that next week as well as looking into alerts for school closings. Another member of Byte Club had previously made a short program that would allow the superintendent of the school to add entries to our database when a 2 hour delay, early dismissal, or closing occurred. So, I will work on gathering this information from the database, alerting the user, and adding a page to display all of those notifications.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
April 6-9
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started off by relaying the past week's events to my mentor. Then, the next step in the coding process is the news. I have to decide which news I want to scrape from the high school website: the upcoming events, or the actual news stories. I am leaning towards the actual news stories because I think that those might encompass some of both categories. Next is to scrape the information I want from the website. The issue is that every news story is its own link that leads to a popup instead of a regular webpage. So, not only do I have to scrape to find each link that leads to each story, but I have to deal with the fact that each link is in an odd format due to the fact that they are all popups. Another question I have to ask myself is whether or not I want to store the articles on our database. I don't want our database too become too full, so I'd rather not have to use it for unnecessary items, however if the articles are not stored on the database, then each device will need to scrape and store the information that they need to display. Another factor is that Python, the language I am using to scrape, does not mix well with text files and HTML, the language I'd use to display the articles, does not mix well with Python. Since the it is less efficient to figure out how to locally store the articles, I decided to suck it up and store them online.
A new problem arose after my first test: the problem with the page not loading before it is scraped has reappeared. Since I am trying to scrape from popups, the information I need is not present when I start scraping. So, I will either have to look for a new way to scrape these articles, figure out how to load the page before scraping it, or use the upcoming events for news instead. The upcoming events would not be hard to scrape, but I'm not sure that they would be as useful for users as the news articles would be.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started off by relaying the past week's events to my mentor. Then, the next step in the coding process is the news. I have to decide which news I want to scrape from the high school website: the upcoming events, or the actual news stories. I am leaning towards the actual news stories because I think that those might encompass some of both categories. Next is to scrape the information I want from the website. The issue is that every news story is its own link that leads to a popup instead of a regular webpage. So, not only do I have to scrape to find each link that leads to each story, but I have to deal with the fact that each link is in an odd format due to the fact that they are all popups. Another question I have to ask myself is whether or not I want to store the articles on our database. I don't want our database too become too full, so I'd rather not have to use it for unnecessary items, however if the articles are not stored on the database, then each device will need to scrape and store the information that they need to display. Another factor is that Python, the language I am using to scrape, does not mix well with text files and HTML, the language I'd use to display the articles, does not mix well with Python. Since the it is less efficient to figure out how to locally store the articles, I decided to suck it up and store them online.
A new problem arose after my first test: the problem with the page not loading before it is scraped has reappeared. Since I am trying to scrape from popups, the information I need is not present when I start scraping. So, I will either have to look for a new way to scrape these articles, figure out how to load the page before scraping it, or use the upcoming events for news instead. The upcoming events would not be hard to scrape, but I'm not sure that they would be as useful for users as the news articles would be.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
March 30- April 1
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
This has been an exciting week! It was cut short because of a trip to RIT, but the time I did have was enough. I've finally finished the athletic calendar section of the app! It was so worthwhile to struggle through the ups and downs of that code because now that it is finished, I am very proud of what I've been able to accomplish. I had to change the scraping algorithm a little bit in the end because the data that I had been getting was not consistent for every event. I also had to put some code in to make sure that every block or every event was filled even if the database did not have the information I needed. I was able to do so by analyzing the times that the data I needed was not present. After that, I have finished! My colleague is still working on troubleshooting the school map and making turn by turn directions to accompany it. My next project will be to work on the news aspect of the app. However, I have decided to integrate the school newspaper into the news portion and differentiate between them in a menu that branches off from the news icon.
In other news, the last official Byte Club meeting of the year was this Wednesday. During the meeting, our president played a video about Unity 5 and spoke about how he has used previous versions o Unity to program and how Unity is a great way to start designing games. We will still have two other unofficial meetings this month, but I am very sad to see this school year pass me by so quickly. Byte Club has been a huge learning experience for me and I have made many friends that I'll be sad to leave. I will have to keep in touch and make sure it stays alive in the coming years because I think it is a great opportunity for high schoolers and I am so glad I joined.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
This has been an exciting week! It was cut short because of a trip to RIT, but the time I did have was enough. I've finally finished the athletic calendar section of the app! It was so worthwhile to struggle through the ups and downs of that code because now that it is finished, I am very proud of what I've been able to accomplish. I had to change the scraping algorithm a little bit in the end because the data that I had been getting was not consistent for every event. I also had to put some code in to make sure that every block or every event was filled even if the database did not have the information I needed. I was able to do so by analyzing the times that the data I needed was not present. After that, I have finished! My colleague is still working on troubleshooting the school map and making turn by turn directions to accompany it. My next project will be to work on the news aspect of the app. However, I have decided to integrate the school newspaper into the news portion and differentiate between them in a menu that branches off from the news icon.
In other news, the last official Byte Club meeting of the year was this Wednesday. During the meeting, our president played a video about Unity 5 and spoke about how he has used previous versions o Unity to program and how Unity is a great way to start designing games. We will still have two other unofficial meetings this month, but I am very sad to see this school year pass me by so quickly. Byte Club has been a huge learning experience for me and I have made many friends that I'll be sad to leave. I will have to keep in touch and make sure it stays alive in the coming years because I think it is a great opportunity for high schoolers and I am so glad I joined.
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