Unfortunately I didn’t make it into the lab today to pick up my progress bar code, so that will have to wait until Monday, but I did make a lot of progress on MM! I coded a third Activity – this one is a pop-up dialog to ask the user what file they want to load. It gets displayed when they choose “load file” from the options menu. To go along with this, I coded full functionality for saving and loading files! I actually coded it twice, the first time it saved it to the phone’s storage, which I didn’t like. The new and final version saves files to the SDCard. I may add functionality to the save feature to name files whatever the user wants, but for now everything is saved as “filename.fa.mmr” MMR stands for Mobile Metagenomics Results filetype (which is actually just a serializable array dumped to a file).

And now my challenge to the lab! MM needs a cool icon for display on the Android phone. Right now it has the generic application window with a gear in front of it, and that is not only boring, but unprofessional. I’m absolute rubbish at art (digital or otherwise), so if somebody in the lab has a knack for it, feel free to make up a 48×48 PNG file for us! You can go with Rob’s tricorder theme, or any other idea you may have that applies. Translucent backgrounds work great as the phone will show the background theme through such a background (yes, I made some very crude artwork to test how this process works). If nobody in the lab feels up to the challenge, I’ll have to create a flat, pixelated masterpiece myself… (you’ve been warned!)