Free Essay About The Options Available To The User Are As Follows:

1. App Introduction - Apium:
Images capture moments in great details and it is often said that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Images asides from projecting captured moments in greater details make the media in which they are presented to come alive especially when the image is in colour. The mobile application I have developed is an image editing app.
Figure 2: App login screen
The application is designed to control access to it with the implementation of a simple registration page with the intent of having the users of the app login. The registration page takes minimal information from the user, using the user’s email address as the unique identification for access to use the app. The other information required at registration includes a password to be used for access to the app at login, the user’s first and last names and location. The required information is limited to this in order not to burden the user and probably discourage using the app with having to enter too much information at registration.
Figure 3: App registration screen
The app checks for the login credentials – email address and password – and will prevent access to the app if the credentials are not correctly entered. The app is also designed to raise a flag if any of the fields is empty. A successful login takes the user to the home screen of the app. The home screen contains two buttons – one for selecting the source of image to be edited and the other button is used to save the final image to the phone. The user has the option of choosing the image from the image gallery on the phone or to enter a url on the internet where the image is located.
The selected image is placed on the image view on the home screen to be viewed while further manipulations are done on the image.
Figure 4: App home screen
The other manipulations that can be done on the image are accessible from the options menu by tapping on the options button on the phone.

Crop Image: This feature allows selecting only the part of the source image that is needed to appear in the final image. The image is resized to the dimensions of the crop size and the area outside this dimension is cut off.
Write on Image: Using this feature, the user can write any text on the image. The text is taken from a dialog interface and is appended to the image on the image view as displayed o the app home screen.
Figure 5: User profile page
Frame Image: The source image can be placed within a choice frame, with the frame forming a border around the image. The image can be framed after cropping or framed directly if cropping is not needed.
View Profile: The registered user’s profile can be viewed using this feature. The profile displays the user’s information as input at registration. From the profile page, a user can edit the profile, thereby changing the information entered at registration. However, not all information is available to the user to change. A user is only allowed to change the location information as name change and login credentials change are not permitted within the purview of this app.

The save button allows the app user to save the final edited image to the phone for future retrieval.

2. App Testing
In order to test the completed app, I gave the compiled APK to three different people each using a mobile phone running different versions of the android OS. This version testing was to determine the behaviour of the app with different API levels of the android OS since view rendering and menu behaviours have slight differences from one OS version to the other. The App was rendered well on API level 19 upwards but required a re-orientation of controls on API 16 to 18. This informed the use of the two buttons on the home screen to enable ease of accessibility to the core functionality of the app.
The app was tested to ensure the security feature in at the login page only takes valid input before processing the information entered. On clicking the login button, it was discovered that an error of “invalid login credentials’ was returned even when no input was entered to either the email field or the password field. A resolution to this was to ensure that the fields are not blank before the app can process logging in a user. The app asks a user to type an input into the fields before proceeding.
Validating email addresses at the point of registration was also done after discovering that the app could take a length of characters not more than 4 as an email address. The control feature put in place is to make sure the length of the email address entered is at least 7 characters before it can be accepted as a valid email address
3. Critical Analysis
At the coding stage of the app development, the app crashed on many occasions owing to referencing mistakes between the layout files and the control code. The page layout is done in xml while java controls the logic of the app. The android platform development is closely knit between the Android manifest file, the resources, the activities and other assets declared in the package. The Android manifest file where all the activities of the app are declared includes the special permissions required by the app, the services it uses as well as the entry point of launching the app which is specified using an intent filter and category launcher. The first source of app crash I encountered in the coding of the app was a result of an omission to reference the email EditText view as declared in the xml file for the login page. Occasional omissions such as these happened a number of times during the app coding process. Furthermore, another source of app crash I encountered was failing to declare an activity in the manifest file. I was only able to detect this omission after reading the log report of the crash which pointed to a missing activity with a call to check the manifest file for the activity declaration.
The third source of crash happened when trying to connect to the internet to fetch images without having declared that the app needs to use the internet – i.e. setting the internet permissions.
Looking back at all these errors encountered, they make the programming experience a rather challenging one on one part, and interesting on the other. It was a challenging experience due to the long hours expended trying to resolve a problem attributed as the cause of the crash. On the other hand, such mistakes after being solved were often not repeated. This made the start of the application development rougher and more time-consuming that the latter part.