Progress: Slowly, but Surely

While deadlines often cause anxiety in most students, Team Chinchilla has risen and made several revelations since beginning our project!

Although a small but, in our professional opinion, necessary feature, we are proud to say that our application logo is coming along nicely! What began as a quick sketch among a few other small sketches has now appeared in digital form. Using GIMP, I've made substantial progress regarding our little Chinchilla Chat logo. See below:

Early sketches for our app's logo.

The current appearance of logo in digital form.

The logo is not finished by any means. We plan to add text (the app name) and eyes to our furry mascot. The animal is, of course, a chinchilla. The bandana represents the casualness, carefreeness, and LGBT+-friendliness of our app, Chinchilla Chat. The rainbow is associated with LGBT+ pride in general.

We've also learned a lot outside of programming specifically for our Android application. Because we were tasked with presenting and demonstrating Android features this week, we learned a lot about speech recognition and text-to-speech features of Android applications. Because our app is a chat app, it involves a lot of text. Adding speech recognition features could allow us to accommodate drivers using the application or individuals who simply cannot access the app by typing and require speech recognition to use it. Text-to-speech would also be helpful for similar reasons, but seems less mandatory. It may not be a feature that has use for our app, but we need to consider both of these features more in the immediate future. However, because we want Chinchilla Chat to be as private and anonymous as possible, requesting permission from users to access their microphone could seem intrusive to some. Again, these features need more consideration. On the plus side, now that we know how to implement these features in general, it will not be too difficult when we write the code for our app if we decide to utilize said features.

We believe that most of our Screens have been created or designed so far. We know what our menus should look like, what color schemes we hope to use, and which screens each button should lead to upon being tapped. I know this seems pretty vague, but our app is more about privately conversing with other individuals than about having dozens of screens. Currently, we are focusing on implementing our most basic features before we move on to enhancements such as custom colors and speech bubbles in chats.

This week, we're hoping to get all of the screens we have planned at this time into the actual program in Android Studio and making sure each button correctly opens the appropriate activity. We'll also be researching more about implementing live chats and more features we can implement using Firebase. We have a lot to do, but we're fairly satisfied with the progress we've made in just a few weeks!