working on a new app

A few days before Halloween Brian settled on his "costume": a bow tie.

Not just any ol' bowtie, but

><  > the Bowtie of the Future <  ><

It would be changeable at a touch. It would set the background to the shirt behind it. It would take photos. It would have a +1 button.

In about 6 hours we cobbled together a bowtie image that would cycle through the Google colors and wiggle when clicked, had a fake +1 button and a counter on the left, a subtle (Google design always runs subtle) "BETA" on the right. "Adjusting" the tie, i.e. rotating the phone back and forth, would take a photo.

There were a bunch of little quirky things to code for. Because of the front camera's placement, the entire app had to be displayed upside-down from the normal landscape mode, otherwise the camera would have been obscured by his collar. Photos taken by the camera resulted as upside-down, but flipping is easy. Since he's tallish, the camera tended to take photos of the top edge of the opposite wall, and I experimented with carving wedges from packing foam until we decided it was more trouble than it was worth. Brian was dissatisfied with the shake code I'd found and fine-tuned it to use the gyroscope and a specific sequence  of motions to listen for.

And of course we didn't actually use the back camera to divine the clothing behind it. Brian picked a shirt, I slapped it on the scanner, and turned it into the background image.

But that isn't the 'new app' of the post title.  I've started a paint program. Nothing that isn't the same as quite a few paint apps out there, and in fact it may be simpler than most. But it's partly for the experience and partly because I have an idea that will make it special.

The basics, of course, include:
- a palette of 10 colors, which can be customized
- fill color
- outline thickness
- brush
- point-to-point lines
- rectangles and ovals
- text (nothing fancy, just plain ol' text using the native Android font in the outline color)
- zooming, panning
- undo
- eraser (you won't believe how hard that is to figure out, partially due to sketchy Android documentation).

All colors include transparency levels.

You can take a photo or select one from your gallery to slide in as the background layer.

You can save the drawing+background to the gallery as a jpg, and share it to email, Drive, etc.

All customizable items (colors, line thickness) are saved in SharedPreferences, so you can always have that perfect 20% transparent purple you love.

I've just finished coding all the above. Neither Brian nor I are fully satisfied with the sequence of events used to add text.  It's not easy to make a not-too-disruptive popup with a space for your text and a slider for your font size when there's a keyboard that will slide in and take up half your screen space.

More to come...