Another day has come and gone, a day that had servings of sunshine & wind,a drizzling of rain & lots of coding!
I spent all my time today working on sample applications and my android application while receiving guidance from James & Thabiso, both are walking encyclopaedias when it comes to mobile development. The morning started off with James helping me through an issue I was having with displaying a google map inside a tabbed fragment, something he had no trouble resolving while explaining my blunders. James then introduced me to the pager sliding tab strip (available on github – https://github.com/astuetz/PagerSlidingTabStrip), this library allows you to create an interactive indicator to navigate between the different pages of a ViewPager. Armed with this information I went to work creating a simple app that incorporates the library, I have found that when ever I learn anything new in programming it really helps my understanding if I create a simple app that focuses on the new topic, by doing this I can absorb the new information easier. Next up was something just as cool, while admiring my newly implemented tab strip I noticed Thabiso was working with one of the interns on a layout which had really nice input validation, if any fields were not filled in or the user entered the wrong type of data a stylish animation pops up with an informative message. After querying Thabiso about it he pointed me to a project on github which I could import into my own app to do the same thing (https://github.com/vekexasia/android-edittext-validator). After a few pointers from Thabiso I again got to work creating a sample app that used the edit text validator. Shortly after completing my edit text validator Thabiso showed me another cool github project that I could import into my app, its called float label (https://gist.github.com/chrisbanes/11247418) and it moves the hint word/sentence of an edit text to the top of the edit text when a user starts inputting text, a handy feature which provides your users with a polished experience. Today James & Thabiso showed me things I thought would take me years to discover how to do but because of their amiable nature towards knowledge sharing I can start implementing really cool and handy features in my apps today, thanks guys!
