More Polishing

I just spent a few minutes polishing up my layouts.

  1. layouts which have a list view in them (such as the “Preset Messages” screen) previously have no separator between the list view and the button(s) at the bottom of the screen (On Android 4.0+, no separator is needed on 2.x). This was because the way that I had it set up, that separator would end up on top of one of the list items if the list was long enough. I found a way to fix that, so now ALL buttons on the bottom of the screen have separators.
  2. I found an easy way to add Cancel and OK buttons to my settings screens. Unfortunately, this is not a simple add the buttons to the view and I’m done. I need to now go through all of the settings screens and make the cancel button return the settings to their previous values. This is not hard, it is just time consuming. (And considering I don’t have a whole lot of time to program this weekend, it won’t be done immediately… likely early to mid next week.)
  3. I added a Cancel button to the bottom of both the Credits and the Help screens.
  4. I added a separator above the buttons on the purchase dialog, when clicking on “New Schedule” in the free version of the app. (Again on Android 4.0+)
  5. The “Do Not Respond” contact picker screen looks exactly like the “Preset Messages” screen. The Sort button is not enabled right now, as I have not worked on sorting the list of contacts yet. I’ll probably work on that early next week as well. (Unfortunately, sorting is not my strong point. But now that I have schedules sorting properly, I should be able to reuse the same code, with some minor changes, for the contact list.)
I think that’s about it. I’m pretty sure that all of the changes I’ve made so far are purely aesthetic, so I won’t be releasing an update today. When I finish the functionality of the buttons at the bottom of the settings screens, I will release the update which includes all of the above mentioned enhancements. 
Once this update is released, navigation throughout the app will be VERY consistent. At the bottom of each screen will be a Cancel and/or OK button, which will take you back to a previous screen, and any actions above those buttons will take you forward to a new screen.
The only screen which will not have such buttons is the main screen, with the tabbed view. This is for 2 reasons:
  1. The scheduler screen is already cramped, and adding more buttons will only make it worse
  2. This means that the user has to hit the Back or Home button on their phone to exit the app.This is consistent with the Android design guidelines, and I think is more intuitive for the user.