The app I am proposing to develop is a community outreach app. The purpose of the app is to give the design team valuable insight into where the community itself feels they need a park and what they would like in it. This means that I am going to be using a litemode map fragment with multiple markers dropped to allow the user to select the location the think most needs a park to be designed. The idea is that the city typically already has a list of sites they have funding to develop, but to let the community decide the location rather than the city itself.
After the user selects the location that they would like a park to be developed at, that data will be stored and they will scroll down to the next activity. The second activity is where the users will actually select the amenities they would like to have included in their public park. They will go through and select the checkbox associated with the amenity they would like. Once they are finished selecting their amenities, they will select submit and a new activity will be started.
This new activity will be the page that outputs the location they chose with its correlated SF amount as well as output the corresponding park illustration according to the amenities they chose. The user will have the option of cycling through more park layout options, or to submit their form which will take them back to the main activity and allow them to submit another location with different amenities if they would like.
One of the elements that I struggled with most when developing my proof of concept was incorporating the google maps element into my app. I began with the mapactivity layout, but was not able to actually see the map itself due to google play access. I was able to work around this problem by figuring out that the Pixel 5 does not have access to google maps, only Pixel 3 does. Once I changed my emulator to the Pixel 3, I then ran into the issue of not being able to resize my map view so that it would not be full screen. After changing the width and height of the map layout, I would get an error informing me that I broke a connection between google play and the map layout. I spent about a day and a half researching what this could be from only to find out that adjusting the height only and not the width was the only way to get keep that connection between google maps and the mapview layout.
The last item that was a bit of a struggle to figure out was the proper layout for the check boxes and image views. The difficult thing was figuring out how to align 12 rows of images and having the check boxes aligned to those image centers. I eventually discovered that for the layout to be adaptive, my overall constraints needed to be on my check boxes rather than the images. If you need an image to be a certain size, you can't have wrap content dimensions for adaptive layouts. My next challenge will be to successfully incorporate a new activity for the parklet illustration output.