Room_Finder_Final-4-30-2010x

Room Locator App

Aabhas

Sharma

Vinayak

Gokhale

Yehia

Khoja


1

Room Locator App

Main Points:


•
Introduction

▫
Hardware

▫
Software

▫
Resources

•
Choosing an App

•
Initial Design

•
Challenges Faced

•
Revised Design

•
Future Directions


2

Room Locator App

Introduction:

•
Hardware used:

▫
Mac and Windows based computers

▫
Android based Phone

•
Software used:

▫
Android SDK

▫
Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers

▫
Android Apps created where for the 2.0.1 platform

•
Resources:

▫
Android developer website:

developer.android.com

▫
Research on Google and YouTube




3

Room Locator App

Choosing an App:

•
Create an App with a new idea and that is useful

•
With Purdue’s huge campus, it is almost
impossible to know where each room in each
building is located.

•
Therefore create an app that shows you where
rooms in buildings are located

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Room Locator App

Initial Design:

•
The user inputs the building and room he wants

•
The app uses the inputs to search for a specific
floor plan in a certain building

•
The app displays the floor plan on the screen

•
Finally, it highlights the room chosen on the
floor plan


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Room Locator App

Challenges with initial design:

•
Creating and using a database:

▫
Insufficient because it will need to store all images
for all floor plans

▫
It requires a script to search through the database
to find the correct image

•
Highlighting the room:

▫
We need to store coordinates of the room in the
database

▫
Use coordinates to dynamically draw a box that
covers the room



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Room Locator App

Solutions for these issues:

•
Upload the floor plan images on a web server

•
The android device can then access the correct
website and fetch the correct image from it

•
In addition we upload separate images with
highlighted rooms on them

•
Finally when we can get an image of the floor
plan with the highlighted room by entering the
correct website

7

Room Locator App

Final Design:


•
For taking the inputs

▫
Use drop down menus to give the user choices for
buildings and rooms

▫
After selecting a building and a room, the app
creates a string

▫
Finally the string is encoded into a URL address
that pulls the appropriate image with the
highlighted room


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Room Locator App

Final Design

•
Creating the URL address:

▫
The code contains a premade URL address which
is missing the building name and room number

▫
The inputs are used to fill in the blanks in the URL
address

▫
The floor is determined through the first digit in
the room number

▫
Finally the building name and room are
concatenated in the URL address

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Room Locator App

Main Things learned/Things to be kept
in mind for next time..

•
Intent and permissions



For the first half of the semester we couldn’t get
the code to pull any data from the internet. Just 3
weeks back we figured out that the permissions for
accessing the internet needed to be added through
the Android Manifest


This is also what generates the permissions list on
a real android phone when an application is
downloaded from the market

Room Locator App

10

Main Things learned/Things to be kept
in mind for next time
..(2)

•
Memory leaks, memory leaks, memory leaks


What are memory leaks?
-

A

memory
leak

or

leakage

in

computer science

is a particular
type of memory consumption by a

computer
program

where the program is unable to
release

memory

it has acquired
.


When it can be caused
–

Initialize a pointer and
don’t de
-
initialize(not a problem in Java, no
pointers!)


Open a file and don’t close it etc.

Room Locator App

11

Main Things learned/Things to be kept
in mind for next time
..(3)

•
While uploading the application to the market,
you have to make your license validity at least 50
years

•
You can’t upload an app with the debug license

•
Make sure if you use a new icon in the resources
folder it is 48X48 and the format is PNG.


Room Locator App

12

Layouts

•
Android supports different sorts of layouts that
can be chosen/defined in the XML file

•
Absolute layout provides the most flexibility,
linear layout provides a rigid and formal layout


Room Locator App

13

Errors in dev. Environment


•
Often a time, the team faced an error when
creating a new AVD(Android Virtual Device),
there would be no network connection.

•
Troubleshooting
–

Make sure your computer is
connected to the internet.

•
If that isn’t the problem, restart the AVD and
that restores the connection(known bug)


Room Locator App

14

Future Directions:

•
Provide room to room directions
–

Ask user
present location and desired destination
–

Draw
the path

•
Upload information about more buildings on the
web server

•
Enhance the look of the program

•
Double check it for any bugs or memory leaks

•
Publish it in the Android app store!

15

Room Locator App

Latest Updates!


•
Purdue VIP finally has the Android
Dev

License!

•
We can start publishing our apps, however
MAKE SURE there are no memory leaks

•
We have published our app but we downgraded
it to 1.6 to test on
Aabhas’s

phone

•
Also, we have not linked the floor plan images as
we were not yet sure about the security
implications



Room Locator App

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Screen Shot
–

Room Locator App

Room Locator App

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