I had been accepted onto the Android Basics Nanodegree full scholarship and after wondering would I make the grade, I was finally relieved and excited.

The course continued with us going through the creation of “The Miwok App” – an app that was written to educate people about the language of the Miwok people – a group of native American people. The next project was to design an app to achieve a certain goal or purpose. We were going to create new activities, use explicit intents to link between activities in the app, use onClickListeners – written in Java this time – to add behaviour to to buttons, create our own custom class, looping through an ArrayList and populating a ListView or GridView with an ArrayAdapter.

The Miwok app “held our hand” through production of such an app and gave us the basis to create our own “masterpiece”. In addition to what was required with our project, the Miwok app also played .wav files of pronunciation of the Miwok words but that wasn’t required for our project.

I decided to create a Music Player App with a front page with a picture and several buttons leading to other activities – each was a genre of music – Rock, Pop, Classical, Disco and Country. Each activity had lists of music from that genre which was created from a list using ListView. Each other activity had buttons to move within the app to each other activity and to the home plus another button which displayed a “Playing Now” page. The purpose of the app was to practice Intents, ListView, Arrays(which made up the lists) and ArrayAdapter. The app didn’t actually play any music; that would be for another lesson some time in the future.

I was really quite pleased with the way that it turned out but to be honest, I look forward to a time when I can style an app to be a bit more visually appealing. I may well add some functionality to it at a later date too – such as actually linking the buttons to real music and actually getting my list/array form an API which is constantly updated. Maybe, some day….