FRC Survival Guide for Android

[rzoeller]

Hi guys!

FRC Team 2169 KING TeC has recently released their new FRC Survival Guide app in the Google Play Store. This app is great for rookie and veteran teams, providing tips and facts on a variety of topics as well as walking teams through a year in FIRST. A few of the topics include Chairman’s, fundraising, and the build season. Teams can use this as a tool to guide themselves through the build season in order to finish on time and in an efficient manner. This app will guide teams through the build season and the off season to guarantee success in reaching your goals.

It would mean a lot to us (the devs and the team) if you guys could check it out! Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! Pictures will be added shortly. We're planning on releasing updates roughly every week from now until the end of build season as we continue to develop the app.

You can find the FRC Survival Guide at https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....survivalguide

Thanks!

[Bryan Herbst]

It looks pretty good!

I'm an Android developer, so I'm probably going to be a bit nit picky. Here are my suggestions (using a Nexus 5):

First, do not ask the user to confirm closing the app when the back button is pressed. This is somewhat of an anti-pattern in Android. Yes, I know there's an option in the app's preferences, but there shouldn't be (or it should default to off). See the flowchart on the Confirming & Acknowledging page of the Android developer docs for some more guidance on this. In short, you should only confirm an action if it could cause the user to lose data or otherwise significantly inconvenience them.

Second, you have some odd margin/padding things going on. See my first attachment- the extra space outside of both the content and the tabs is a bit awkward. This disappears when I enable the navigation drawer. It also happens with the main ListView (attachment 2), but I can concede that could be a design decision. I personally expected the ListView to fill the width, but you could convince me otherwise.

Thirdly, the text in the "About KING TeC" dialog turns black when pressed (see third attachement). I think this usually occurs when android:autolink is set on a TextView, and can be circumvented by manually specifying a color. IMO, the dialog should also have a "close" button. Dialogs without any sort of action button can be confusing.

Finally, I suggest a different application icon for a few reasons. First, this icon doesn't really say anything about the app. Second, it will be a little strange if your team comes out with a second app, since the icon is a team logo.

Keep up the good work!

[rzoeller]

Thank you very much for the feedback! It means a lot having someone take the time to constructively critique your work, and everything you've mentioned is extremely valid.

The icon was stuffed in there at the last minute as I realized I didn't have an icon made and wanted the app to be published in time for Minnesota Splash.

Would you recommend removing the prompt about exiting altogether? Or just disabling it by default? It's something that was added early on in the development process and stuck around, so I have no problem removing it if you think it would make the app more consistent.

And yes, the padding around layouts needs a bit of work

[geomapguy]

I like the app. Pretty cool idea. While searching on Google Play for FRC, I found out that the manual is published as an app. It also seems to update with the online one.

Thank you haha

[Bryan Herbst]

Originally Posted by rzoeller

The icon was stuffed in there at the last minute as I realized I didn't have an icon made and wanted the app to be published in time for Minnesota Splash.

Hehe, I've definitely been there before. I'm also not much of a designer, so coming up with a suitable icon can be difficult! If you have some students on the team interested in graphic design, they might be interested in helping out.

Originally Posted by rzoeller

Would you recommend removing the prompt about exiting altogether? Or just disabling it by default? It's something that was added early on in the development process and stuck around, so I have no problem removing it if you think it would make the app more consistent.

Personally, I would just remove it. If you have other people on the team who really likes it (or you find users who do), then you could make an argument for leaving it.