Although learning to program well while trying to develop a new product has been at times arduous and time consuming, I am pleased to report that I have finished the application EcoMap Editor. This app allows the ScrapZero company to edit data on the iPhone app (EcoMap) without having to be a programmer. Here it is running: (As you can see, I've left the last column open for me to add notes to myself for the future.)
I spent this last week finalizing what I am currently calling EcoMap Editor. I've had all of the code ready for a while, but once I exported the code to an actual project, I realized a few things. First of all, my code used commas to delimit the text files that it imports. Essentially this means that the user of the program is restricted from using commas in sentences. This was not a difficult fix as I simply converted these commas to "***" and then converted these symbols back into commas when the data was retrieved by the iPhone. This might make a little more sense with the following diagram of the program's workflow:
Essentially, the app that I just finished takes computer jargon and turns it into human-readable text which can be edited and converted back into computer-speak. But typing commas when running the EcoMap editor simply messed up the program making it useless.
The second problem was that the program would only import this text file that I mentioned in the java developing platform, Eclipse. This is where the programmer makes his or her basic code to later export. Once I exported my files to be run as a stand alone applications, the program could no longer import the text file. So I ended up having to find the current path of the running program through some slightly more complex methods. The complexity wasn't as much of an issue as was the strain of rewriting my (at once functional) code. But I finally fixed all of that and got to the fun part of programming, design!
So I finished the week making the icon for EcoMap Editor in photoshop. It's simple and elegant.
I know this blog post has been unusually technical and possibly confusing. Please ask anything that you don't understand.
