3rd iteration of BI SP2

What we have learned

Releasing the Android app

It seems that we can not publish, or it is not easy task, our Android app because we do not have the keys (reinstalation of computer). And there is no easy way to get it right, maybe by contacting the support. Never mind, we have learnt that we have to store private keys for every app so we can update it. Without the keys, this is not possible. And we cannot change the keys by an easy way.

Flutter v1.0

A new, first stable, version of Flutter is released. This comes with support of maps and other external sources etc., so in the future it might be easier to develop apps with the Flutter framework.

Also, the support for desktops (Windows, Mac, Linux) and even web (some combination of html, css and canvas) has been introduced. This thing is HUGE because the ease of creating apps on mobile platforms will now be available on computers and it is a real enemy of frameworks like the Electron framework.

Expectation vs reality

As it can be seen in the Summary section, we have had some expectations or goals to do in this semester. We have sucessfully fix the bugs, updated things, add things – things like login, search, profile detail, comments. Hovewer we have not done things like full port to web app, picture in a card and tags. Those task was just too hard or time-eating. It might be a good things to start with in the next developtment of the project.

Those "fails" are not negative, tho. We know the life of the project is like "a living creature" and issues occurs all the time. We did not have time to do some things, but that is ok, we did another very well and we did a good teamwork, app design etc.

Design and technologies

In the SP1 we have created some designs and decided to use some technologies. And we understand why we have done things we did. But now we can see we could have chosen better, both in design and technologies. We have chosen not so well known technologies and Flutter was even in Alpha/Beta before. We had to dealt with bug fixes because of the updates (we wanted to stay up to date).

Firebase is a nice technology, NOSQL database. But when we needed some advanced filtering, this prevented us to do it in the best way. Firebase only support some basic filters and downloading some additional data and filter it on the client is for sure not the ideal way. I think later in our careers we will not choose NOSQL databases, but it depends on the app design and purpose, of course.

Summary

We have created a solid application which has a lot of good things and some bad, but anyway the most important thing is that we all have learnt a lot working on this project.