Which way is up?

Do you ever have days where you can't even begin to tell which way is up? I have been having that feeling for the past week at least.

I am winding down the Android and iPhone development so it is at least ready to go to beta. We have a doctor that is ready to test it. We thought he was going to do it on phones and 7" tablets but he bought 10" tablets instead. I needed to add an xlarge portrait and landscape version of the home screen to the layout directory. Not a big deal but the button images need to be 256x256 to not look stupid small on the screen. My original images are 128x128 and the phone version I use 100x100. Any time you scale up things look crappy but I don't have time right now to find new base images or to totally pretty up the ones I have. I ran the sharpen tool in Paint.NET so they look acceptable.

QA has not had enough time to look it all over either. The main QA person was hit by a car while riding her bike to work. Bike is total but she is doing OK and is now back at work but under the loopy state of pain meds due to a fractured hip. To toss in irony the driver of the car is also a cyclist who has been hit by a car. Pay it forward revenge style it appears.

I think the app is pretty solid as I have run it through its paces a number of times. There are only so many screens and so many data types meaning a lot of the code is hit over and over as you create a case. I installed it a Xoom today and it ran perfectly. I have run it in the emulator but not on the actual device. The big worry is connectivity. If it drops in the middle of some areas it could be bad. Something you think about from a desktop but generally things work but on a phone walking through a hospital could cause the connection to drop easily.

I have researched the universal iPhone / iPad build setup for Xcode and I really want to take that route before we ship. Currently the iPad would just show a 2X iPhone version and I think that would be crappy. It appears Apple is using something similar to Android where you can name your XIB files with a ~ and have an iPad layout without code changes. You do have to tie all the controls to the extra XIB file but that should not be too bad. I will need better resolution images here too. Only the home screen with the buttons that launch you off to other areas should be affected but since I have not tried doing anything native iPad I would guess there are some other gotchas.

I am working on our scheduler written in Java using MigCalendar while I await QA and beta feedback on the mobile side. I have never used MigCalendar before so I have to learn those controls first. It has been a tough row to hoe. The MigCalendar API is not straight forward. Lots of parameters to lots of methods and it is not taking advantage of generics and enumerations as much as it could. The documentation is sparse and on-line help is limited. It seems to be very powerful but not super easy to understand. I have some of the requested enhancements in place I need like a tree control going more than 2 levels deep and multi-line header control for those instances. I now understand why our code was artificially limiting things to this depth as it had categories under categories that are hidden from the user as we filter 3 ways (ugly GUI here) - one from a tab, one from a combobox and one from the tree control. I need to clean all of this up without breaking how existing people use it.

I started with a test application just to learn the basics of the calendar controls. Once I got the header doing what I wanted I moved into our real code and started stripping things out and redoing what is created for the CategoryDepository which happens to be a singleton but not in a good way. This lead me to figure out why the old code that was executed every time any little thing happened in the UI did what it did. Of course nearly everything is broken now. I may have to abandon my changes due to the next item on the list.

Our C# developer has left the building but we need updates the the C# appointment scheduler. I know C# too having written a number of utilities in it and doing a conversion of a real-time stock market program from Java to C# a number of years back. Nothing like doing Java + Swing, Java + Android SDK, Objective C + iOS SDK and C# + WinForms at the same time.

There are 54 open issues on the C# scheduler and customers want them now. I have to get a handle on the code first. Initial glance shows a strong preference to cut and paste versus make a method, lack of any real comments and hard coded SQL strings that repeat every column name in every command instead of a nice collection of column names and the commands being built. You have to search a lot of code if you need to add a new column to a table and make sure everything works around it as the code stands. I can look at the code but not build and run it as it uses a couple of third party control packages and we need to transfer the developer license from the departed developers machine to mine once we sort them all out. He was not much on source control or documenting what he did so it has been a trial by fire.

I will be in another situation where I am using third party controls I don't have experience with just like I am doing with MigCalendar under Java. Mind set switching between Java and C# has been pretty easy in the past. There are some really nice things in C# and some annoyances. Visual Studio is a bit lacking compared to IntelliJ and Eclipse but is generally better than Xcode.

Yep another IDE to use. The Android side is Eclipse, Java + Swing is IntelliJ, Objective C is Xcode and now I get to use Visual Studio too! Different hot keys abound. I can easily be in all four of them in the same day with 3 running on a single machine. Keeps food on the table and clothes on the kids but my mind is turning to mush as keeping things straight during the context switches of the day can really wear you out. Nothing ever seems to be totally done and the list of open tabs I have in PSPad keeps growing. I have a tab with project notes for each item I am working on to keep track of what is left to do and my random thoughts on areas that could be improved. I jot stupid stuff on paper too during the day but try to keep a digital version of my thoughts so I don't forget things I need to revisit when I am in the code or to keep track of what is implemented on the Android that I have not ported to the iPhone or what has not gone in the opposite direction.