Android Calculator app was created using Java and Kotlin.
I built this app because I wanted to apply my knowledge of Android Studio that I have been working on recently. As a student in the Math faculty, I appreciate calculators that are easy to use, have a straight-forward syntax, and are visually appealing, yet simple. Since those are quite rare to come by, I developed this object-oriented app that combines a sleek user interface with a functinal code background.
One of the things that went well on this project was writing Java methods corresponding to each button that would be executed when the button was pressed. This was both interesting and challenging at times, as I had to convert information on the screen, such as cursor position, to mathematical variables, and vice versa.
On the other hand, a thing that took me the most time to figure out was setting up the User Interface. This took me a while because I was using an old Android device in the emulator which failed to display the app's interface properly. I thought the problem was within my code, but it was the emulator. After shifting to a new Android device, this issue was resolved automatically.
This project taught me a lot. I learned to:
- Create a functional and appealing user interface through various layouts, i.e. tables, buttons, editable text views
- Implement constraints effectively to make sure that the app is displayed identically across different devices
- Connect the interface with object-oriented Java code
- Convert information on the screen to mathematical data, operate with it, and display the results to the screen
Next time, I would begin the project by using a more modern phone in the emulator to avoid problems with UI.
To improve my project, I am going to add a settings tab where the user would be able to customize the colours of the app's interface. Also, currently my app displays all numeric results as floats, so I am going to make sure that when the result is an integer, it is displayed as such.