This week I finalized the plans for the schedule JSON structure that will be created in the companion app and sent over to the device. This did involve some small minor design changes, but shouldn’t affect the planned user experience of the app and device, as most changes were made in the backend structure. Most of these small changes were made to transform as many of the JSON field as possible into integers, since those are easier to send as characteristics which is what the device will save relevant data as.
For example, while users can select what days of the week they want to receive certain reminders through a series of toggled buttons, the actual JSON will save the days active as a seven bits, where each 1 corresponds to a day the reminder will be triggered. As an example, a reminder triggered only on weekdays will have value 0111110. This prevents us from having to save a list of strings and instead only work in the form of an integer.
In a similar vein, start/end time selection will be done with a standard time picker included in material (example shown below), but the specific time will be saved as a single integer that corresponds to minutes after midnight.
The final major change comes in the parameter that determines how often a reminder should be repeated. User will be given several initial options like every hour or every three hours, but will also have the option to set an hour and minute value so they can have reminders repeat whenever they want. In the backend again it will be saved as a single integer that corresponds to the minutes between each reminder.
Overall these changes don’t much impact my planned schedule, as they all involve simple material components that are largely interchangeable. I should have a first look at the schedule creation application done in a week, but medical appointments may push me to next weekend. Overall I feel like I am in a good position and am ready for the coming weeks.