Augustana Course Connection

      This week we aimed to implement new features that would make navigating and using the functions of our app easier for our users. We removed the action bar from the top portion of our app and replaced it with the Android widget, toolbar. This gave us the opportunity to add a variety of buttons to the top banner of the app that will be accessible from any page or activity of Course Connection. We moved the sign out button from the main screen so we were able to save some screen space for other features in the future. After a bit of discussion we decided to leave this feature of the menu bar open ended. Currently it contains the sign out button and the "My Profile" button which will take you to a screen where you are able to view all of the ratings that you have left. In the future we may add more to this toolbar. The next pieces we added were a set of drop down menus so the user is able to sort reviews by their course code. This feature also assisted us in adding...

 We made lots of progress this week! On Thursday of this week (April 22nd) we had our first sprint demo where every group showed off what they have accomplished so far in their team projects. It was really cool seeing where everyone was at on their projects and what everyone has been working on. For our group, we presented the newest version of our app that includes a working review feature! Attached to this post are two screenshots of the app during the process of leaving a review. The top-most picture is a picture of the current UI we have in place for leaving a review. You can enter the course you are reviewing, the rating out of five stars, the professor you had, and then an area for general comments. Once you hit the submit button, the review is entered into our Cloud Firestore database through Google Firebase. The second picture is the current basic UI to view reviews. We want to revamp it soon to look a bit more appealing and have a bit more functionality, but for the purpos...

 We had a busy week in our Senior Inquiry course. This week we presented the final product of our individual projects to the class. Now that we have presented the individual projects, all of our attention can turn to the group project. Lately we have been working on integrating Google Firebase into our project. We managed to get the Firebase authentication functionality working for our project so now users sign into the app using a Google account. We also have some rules in place so that only Augustana students may log in since that is the intended audience for the app. This was relatively easy to implement since all Augustana students have emails that follow the same format with their email ending in the year they enrolled at Augustana followed by the Augustana domain name (as an example, consider xxx17@augustana.edu). Our first "sprint demo" will be on Thursday, April 22nd so we want to have a bit more functionality in our app by then. More than likely, we will be trying to...

 Progress on the app has been relatively slow the past few days. We are entering our Easter Break here at Augustana College so the group members have been more focused on getting some much needed time off from our classes than making huge amounts of progress on our app. We also had a bit of a mishap with Github merging that we had to remedy before moving forward. That being said, we have still been working diligently. This week we worked a bit more on the Fragment idea to make different tabs to navigate to within the app and we also have been working on integrating Google Sign In into our app. Google Sign In has been giving us some problems, but we managed to get it working for at least one group member's device. We are not  exactly  sure what the problem is that's causing the Google Sign In to fail on other devices, but in an attempt to remedy that, we have been looking into integrating Firebase into our app. Firebase seems like a logical next step since it offers so man...

     Week 4 of Course Connection saw the development of a new home screen using android fragments. This layout will allow the user to navigate through the app without having to open new activities. This was a desirable format for our app, as we always wanted to implement a tab bar that can be used to navigate between different sections of the application. (As seen in the provided page from our original storyboard )       When fully implemented, these tabs will serve as a useful tool to switch between the professor leaderboard, course/professor reviews, and course forums. This should help the application to feel more navigable.  This will also aid us functionally, as fragments have built in utility to allow for saving states, and is less intensive than opening new activities. 

     It is week three of our development of Course Connection. We are at the point in the semester where we will need to really kick our work into gear and focus on each aspect of our app as the deadlines begin to approach. This week we are wrapping up the tech tutorials we mentioned last week in our blog. With these out of the way, a majority of class time will now be used to discuss the project and get work done.       The progress of our project will be tracked by both our updates here on our blog, as well as our code updates on our team Github repository. This week we made our first set of pushes onto our repository with some introductory features of our app. One of these core functions is limiting user access to users with a augustana.edu email address. Since this is an app developed for use by Augie students, we want their voices to be the only ones present. Part of the problem we saw with other services with similar function to our app was that ...