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Development Blog #7: Final Stretch

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Hello All, We here at on the PicSpot Dev team have been pretty busy over the past week implementing the remaining core features into the app. We have made quite a few changes on both the front and back ends in order to put these new features into a usable state. The biggest two features that we had added this week were a separate screen to view other user's spots that does not allow for any changes to be made if you are not the discoverer, as well as the ability to upload pictures from your device and store them as a thumbnail for the Spot. While the first feature was relatively straightforward, we had a real tough time getting the photo uploading implemented which made the final product feel that much better. With the culmination of multiple weeks worth of work on that one single feature, a much needed sigh of relief was let out knowing that we now have it done and have the experience already to implement the same feature for the profile slides. With most of the core functio

Development Blog #5: Week 7 Demo #1

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Hello all, this week marks the due date of our first demo of the application! As promised, our dev team did actually manage to get some key functions in place while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the last couple missing major functions. The major functionalities that Team Echidna has managed to include in this first demo are: Ability for users to register with an email to then have their "spots" credited to them as Founders! This includes user sign in, registry, and sign out functions. Spots are now saved to the firebase database. Ability to view created spots and have the spot information populated. This includes the spot name, description, and location information. Some basic user information is now saved in the database which will be used to populate Profiles later on. Users can now test the "Upload" picture ability to now upload pictures from their camera roll. Look forward to having pictures saved with the spot, and the ability to take a pict

Development Blog #4: Week 6 Snapshot

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Going into week 6, we began to plan what we needed done immediately on our project, with the aim of having most of the core functionality finished by the end of the week, or next week at the latest. The core functions we aimed to complete this week are as follows: The ability to access/view a profile, that user's pictures, and information. Implement the core data class Enable the camera for creation of photos At the very least an upload feature to display images Finding nearby pic spots (popular picture locations) Set up offsite (server-side) storage of credentials (and eventually pictures) [Using Firebase] Enable profile creation and ability to view other profiles Create an icon for app use In preparation for sprint 1, we are completing core functionality details, as well as beginning to polish up for a final application. For sprint 1 we aim to have a functional, albeit not totally efficient application to showcase. Things we have accomplished for sprint 1:

Development Blog #3: Making Progress

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With week 5 over and done with, we wanted to share with you the progress that we have made thus far. While seemingly small, the number of obstacles we had to overcome meant we have made some substantial progress in getting closer to the finished product. We started off by getting our app to look as close as we can to its final finished form. Our vision uses tabbed fragments to view each of the different pages of our app so that was the first thing we have implemented. Next we had implemented the core feature of our app being the map display powered by Google Maps API. The final major addition we had made was to include infrastructure for adding new pin markers to our map for when we get to the complete main feature of adding new locations. We also have added Firebase framework, but have not utilized it as of yet. While we may not have gotten full implementation of the core functionality, by completing these pre-requisites for it, we are another step closer. Below you can see the cu

Development Blog #1: Mobile Application Planning

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Since the beginning of week 2, we have made significant progress on planning the development and eventual release of our mobile app. After some contemplation, we ultimately decided to make a social photography app that will allow users to share locations with photographic potential with other app users. The initial discoverer of the location will have their name displayed to anyone who views the location. With some time the app will become populated with more sites that users can view around the world. With a concrete idea nailed down, we have moved forward to determining the general structure of the application as well as potential features. Although nothing is entirely set in stone yet since we have yet to move forward to the actual development phase, our current plans can be seen in our storyboard.