Unbox Yourself!

October 7th, 2016

I’m an introvert.

Like, an extreme introvert. If not reminded I can go for weeks without leaving the house at all. Most of my outings consist of trips to the grocery store. Anxiety is a terrible thing, folks.

When I started planning the project that was to become “Scripts for Weirdos” I knew that one of the 52 projects would be an Android app. It would need to be small, since the SFW project requires one app in a new language every week for a year. I decided I would make a little app that would let me track when I last left the house.

Of course, as things work out, this one took me two and a half weeks. Project #1 and I’m already moving the goalposts. I’ll provide a counterargument that this app required learning three new languages – Java, SQLite and Google’s use of XML, plus I had to get familiar with the entirely new development environment of Android Studio.

Unbox Yourself does what I wanted it to do. It lets me keep a record of when I left the house. I can track it in any of three different ways. GPS Mode uses location detection and records when I move at least 80 meters from a stored set of latitude & longitude coordinates. Wifi Mode tracks when I leave my home wifi network. Manual Mode records an outing when I click a button. Outings are stored in a SQLite database and can be viewed and exported to a CSV file. Users can switch between modes at will.

As with all output from SFW, I’ve uploaded the source code for Unbox Yourself to Github. You can see some screenshots below. I probably will not be publishing it on Google Play as it is far from a polished thing, so if you want to try it out you can download it from here. You’ll need to enable installation of apps from unknown sources to allow it to run on your Android device.

 

Oh, you want screenshots? I can do that.

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