Love Calculator | The story of my first ever App development experiment.
This is the story of our first experimental app. Back in 2013, we started experimenting with blackberry phones from day one of getting a developer device from Zac. We mean, me and Meril from my class. Honestly, we didn’t have any previous experience with blackberry or making apps. Merril used to make games that were with game engines. New blackberry was a new kind of environment with a list of inbuilt elements and developer environment.
📱 Tinkering with Sample Apps
Developer portal provided a good number of sample apps that are demonstrating different capabilities of the platform. Like how to store in a database or how to showcase photos inside an app. We randomly take these sample apps and run in our phone to see how these apps actually work. Since we didn’t have any clue to start an app from scratch, what we have done is take a sample app and make small changes in code in it and see how it changes in the actual app in the phone.
💡 The Idea
The idea was to create a love calculator. Those days facebook apps like ‘who secretly like you’ kind of made huge traction. So we thought building something romantic will be the need of the hour. The app will take one name ( of your crush ) and will predict the love shared between two people in percentage. Along with this, the app will show an appropriate quote for the kind of love they have.
🧱 The Foundation
Call Pizza was one of the apps that we liked very much. The Call a Pizza sample allows the user to look up the name and phone number of pizzerias in a certain region of the United States by entering a zip code. They made this app to showcase the capability of the platform like the documentation says.
The Call A Pizza example demonstrates how to invoke the phone application
with a pre-selected number.
You will learn how to:
- Use the Phone class
- Query data from a web service
- Apply animations
- Separate business logic from UI
Why we liked the app was not at all about the complex capability, but the animation movements. We really like the way screen changes when the search button clicks. So we thought let’s edit this app and try out making something new from this.
🎨 User experience
We made the app. Merril created UI parts with romantic designs and logos. We took the app to class and started showing to our friends. People took the phone and went outside the class to get privacy and tried their luck with sweating hands and fast-beating hearts. Suddenly all of the classmates around wanted to try out the app and see their romantic future. Some people really appreciated the app as it says the truth from heaven as some dis hearted people who didn’t score the percentage they wished for came really hard on us. People took the app so seriously that even we thought about what is happening.
🧙♂️ Then how did we made a product the people made to believe is telling the truth?
In the first screen, there was only one text box in a neatly designed screen. When the name entered and the calculate button is pressed the screen moves with an animation and a partly new screen comes. There will be a percentage of how much love exists between the user and the person of the name along with a suitable quote about their love. The design and the animation of changing the screen to a new one with a set result and no extra elements like ads made an atmosphere of the app trustable.
The only clever thing we did was, we made sure there will be more than 50% of love always, as the person entering the name will be entering his/her crush’s name for the first try. So there is a 50% of likeness in the equation already. The app will show a percentage between 50 and 100.
Truth No #1
The percentage numbers are shown absolutely randomly.
Truth No #2
There is no relation between the names and percentages. No, we not even did a FLAMES test here.
Truth No #3
The quotes that are so heart touching depending on the situation of love based on the number, is not actually based on the number. The quotes are also fully random.
🏗️ How it actually worked !
Rand() / Random() is a function that you can see in almost all the programming languages. What this function does is, it will generate a random number. We can give inputs to the function to limit the number generated within a specific range. So we will be getting a random number between 0 and 50 and add 50 ( Assuming the user already had a crush toward the named person ). So in this experiment, The name is given as Anamega and the result was 90. This came as Random(0,50) gave 40 and added 50 gives a total of 90.
There is only 1 line of code that actually mattered, even though the unused codes in the sample apps where capable of doing querying from internet and get the pizza place details, we did nothing on that codes as we don’t know what part of the app it will break if we edited single line of code. We change only the button click function to make this app.
Two major learnings from this exercise are
1. User experience and understanding users
There was literally ‘adhava biryani vilambiyalo’ moments in the class while we were showcasing the app. As people took that very seriously. That reminds us about many things including how blindly people are trusting technology even if they were learning Computer science, undergraduate. The looks and behaviour ( UX ) of the app was really mattered as if we had done the same thing in a white screen with a text box and submit button on the top right corner of the screen and nothing else, people wouldn’t have believed it.
2. ‘Steal like an artist’ works for code too
This was one of my favourite books, a very small book on how to get started on things you wanted to explore. We couldn’t have done this app and get the same feedback if we try to make everything from scratch. We didn’t know much about anything. So we took the sample app, made some edits and boom, something new is here.
It’s really okay if you didn’t know the whole of it. Just start tinkering around the things you like and eventually, you will learn how the whole system works, but don’t wait to learn everything on day one.
Start experimenting, making small changes and learn on the go. This will enable you to keep your enthusiasm high and the learning and building process continues.
