Jiawei here!
In the first 3 days of starting this project, I was really blur. I followed every instruction on the android development tutorial on the android website and still didn't manage to make MyFirstApp work. Nick says it's due to the version - kitkat, jellybean.. yeah those. The website shows that it's okay to have Froyo as the lowest version but that's not the case. After changing the lowest version to JellyBean (By Nick, any version of JellyBean should do) and redoing the tutorial, it worked!
The second problem I faced was getting used to Eclipse. I'm a new Eclipse user so the boxes and the squiggly lines are new to me. What turns me off most was the technical jargons they use for errors. Given my limited knowledge in programming, I couldn't quite get these jargons and I have to Google them. Sometimes these explanation give raise to more technical jargons and I have to Google for them too. This means I spend 1 hour Googling on an API method I read when I spent 5 seconds writing this API method. Still, I have to say I learn a lot faster with Eclipse highlighting these errors for me.
Currently, I'm tasked with a simple, small portion of our project. We meet up during the weekdays to do pair programming - actually, this means Nick doing 80% of the work and me just nodding, talking, and doing the Googling. I try to "catch up" with him by watching Android Development Tutorials Youtube videos. It's working out better now. I'm able to code out something decent without bombarding him with questions. Nick also spends less time repeating things to me. Now, we're more "what to put in" instead of "how to put it in".
Time logging: I took about 1 day just to complete the first tutorial, not including download and setup time. We then did pair programming for 3 days, about 7 to 8 hours for the first 2 days and 5 hours on the third day.
In the following days, we aim to complete our app - have the functions pin down first before we start on GUI. In the meantime, we'll still go for Orbital milestones or mission control to learn more stuff. Hopefully we have time to try out some of the things they taught, like HTML5 and CSS to make this blog look nicer.
Cheers!
JIAWEI
