Writing a fitness tracker app in Flutter (Day 1)

This is a second "serious" mobile application project that i and my friend have a chance to work on. The first one not really meet our satisfaction so this time we decided to be even more "serious".

Motivate people to walk with some fancy looking mobile application is the basic requirement of this app.

Trello

First, we need something to keep everything else in check. We choose Trello. Really cool web app, hope i can make something like that in the future.

With all the task marked down next is to do the research, a lot of research actually. You see, this is our first time using Flutter, after reading through some document about Flutter and Dart, understanding the basic concept of Flutter as well asDart language syntax, its time for looking into how to get some necessary data from the user.

Activity Recognition

We need a way to check if the user is walking, so after some time consulting Google-sama, we got some idea of how to do this.

You see both Android and IOS has an API for checking the user current activity. Mean while Flutter has a outdated package that hook everything up.

How do i know its outdated? Well it didn't compile and the fact that it hasn't been updated in 13 months doesn't help either. I can try and fix that and make it compile somehow, but the last time i did it i fell into a dependencies hell with all the package incompatible with each other and shared library version difference from package to package.

Luckily, the package this time is kinda small and the native API is really straight forward (that what i think at the time after reading some document about the API), i decided that it would be a good idea to make the bridge between Dart and native myself.

Me: ...
Me: Where the hell am i suppose to get a "context"?
Me: ..
Me: AND WHAT THE F IS AN INTENT?
Me: ..
Me: WHY THE F MY CALLBACK NOT BEING CALL.
Me: Isn't that what its suppose to do? You know, getting CALL BACK

Okay, it not really a smooth sail is it. By the way the answer for those "rant" is:

• In the MainActivity (the thing that extend FlutterActivity) scope, a context is this or you can call getContext

• An Intent ... i still didn't really know what an intent is, but you need to create a new class that extends something, in my case IntentService then you can do

new Intent(this, SomeThingExtendsIntentService.class);

• The SomeThingExtendsIntentService.class need to be place in AndroidManifest.xml with a service tag like:

<service android:name="com.example.app.SomeThingExtendsIntentService" />

After a while of testing, everything work as intended and i go to sleep early for the day. Or is it?