Hello again and welcome back.

I started my Nanodegree on the 6th of November 2017. The course was administered on-line as so many of these courses are and I was assigned a mentor.

I was first shown how to install Android Studio and then set about creating my first project – a birthday card. It was really an exercise in getting to grips with the user interface and XML. Android Studio created a Main Activity (Java) but I wasn’t expected to go anywhere near it at that stage. I was encouraged to play around and make a variety of designs of birthday cards/Christmas cards in XML using LinearLayout and Relative Layout. Very soon it was time to sent off my first project for “marking”:-

The first project was a single page “Business card” or similar using various styling instructions in .xml – margins, layouts, sizing of text, pictures and “views”. This was mine. The address is that of Udacity in Mountain View, the logo – Udacity and the photo; an appropriate one was found with a web search. Quite fetching, don’t you think? Unfortunately, it wasn’t interactive yet.

The next step was to learn how to get our designs to do something which meant getting into Java coding. I was guided through an app called Court Counter – a score keeping app and was encouraged to code “as you go”. In the end I had a score counter based on the the game of tennis to refer to before creating the next submitted project, but I’ll tell you all about that next time…