SmokeSignals

CS56 Winter 2016 - Independent Android Project

Original Author: [Pedro M. Sosa]

Authors: Franklin Tang, Jackey Lau

Authors: Simon Wong, Sayali Kakade

Authors: Ankush Rayabhari, Porter Haet

Project Objective

Android app that allows you to automate several tasks that can be triggered by an incoming SMS

Implemented Methods

Say you forgot your phone, Using someone else's phone you can text yourself:

• "//Location" : and the phone will text you back with it's gps coordinates.
• "//Contact [name]" : and the phone will text you back with the stored contact info of anyone who fully or partially matches [name].
• "//Battery" : and the phone will text you back with its battery percentage and charging status.
• "//Calls" : and the phone will text you back the last phone calls it has gotten.
• "//Ring" : (WIP) and the phone will start ringing.
• "//Help" : Return the list of all possible
• "//SMS [number] m:[message]" : Send an sms to [number] saying [message].
• "//Joke" : Send a random joke from an array of jokes from the phone's data base.
• "//Wifi [arguemnt] : and the phone will turn the wifi "on", "off", or will return the status if there is no argument.
• //Bluetooth [argument]: and the phone will turn the bluetooth "on", "off", or will return the status if there is no argument.
• //Status [argument]: get the status of the "wifi", "bluetooth", or "all" using these arguments.
• //Powersave [function name]: to turn off function.
• //WhiteList : not a text but a function that allows the phone fucntions to be exclusive to the numbers that are saved on the phone.

Ideas for Improvments

Essentially you can come up with tons of different things to automate, so you can use that phone "by proxy" through SMS from some other phone. See issues for the list of potential fixes/updates to make.

• Custom Commands: Commands shouldn't be hardcoded. The user should be allowed to change them.
• Fix Ringing: It should ring for say 2 minutes and then stop ringing as soon as the user interacts with the phone (hint: you might find Intent android.intent.action.USER_PRESENT usefull)
• **GUI :**Setup a GUI that lets you change commands to custom commands, blacklist, whitelists.
• Blacklist: which phones are prohibited to use our service.
• //Location: Use Fused location instead of GSM only. Maybe add some timer, so that if it can't find any GSM location it stops after certain time (otherwise it'll drain the battery)
• //Snap: Take a selfie and send media sms with the picture (mobile data has to be enabled)
• //ScreenSnap: Take a screenshot of what is going on your phone currently and send media sms with the picture

User Stories

Completed issues:

• As a user, I can text my phone "Jokes" so that I can random grab a joke from a data base in the app. 150 points
• As a developer, I can save the preferences of the settings after it has been made. 300 points
• As a developer, I can provide a GUI to switch off functions so that I can turn off functions that I don't want to use. 300 points
• As a user, I can text my phone to send a message to a phone number so that people will know I don't have my phone. 50 points
• As a user, I can text my phone to send the Wifi state of my phone so I know if it's using battery life on Wifi. 75 points
• As a user, I can text my phone to send the Bluetooth state of my phone so I know if it's using battery life on Bluetooth. 75 points
• As a user, I can whitelist phone numbers to prohibit most people from using the app so that I can maintain privacy. 100 points

To be implemented:

• As a user, I can text my phone to turn off functions to save battery life.100 points
• As a developer, I can put jokes in a text file to read from so that I can allow the java file look cleaner. 50 points
• As a developer, I can provide a screen to record activies so that I can debug activities and show the actions of the app to the user.
• As a user, I can blacklist people so that I can maintain privacy. 100 points
• As a developer, I can improve the whitelist function by allowing to add people from contacts or numbers with symbols. 100-300 points
• As a developer, I can make a blacklist function to be able to stop specific numbers from using the app's functions. When the blacklist setting is on, the whitelist setting is automatically turned off. 100 points
• Further issues and point values can be found in the issues section of the repo.

F17 Final Remarks

Currently the codebase is in decent condition, and the android app is bug free. The bulk of the work that was done this quarter was refactoring the old code into something more maintainable. The guiding principle we followed in refactoring was that it should be easy for future code editors to add new commands, etc. There is some code that used topics not covered in class, such as reflection and Android’s Room Library over SQLLite. Reflection is used CommandManager.java to be able to execute a command when given a SMS command. Room is used in the storage package to store data in a Sqlite database. I recommend reading up about it here. Besides those two things, the code is fairly straightforward. Running the Android app can be a little tricky; I would ask your mentor if you run into trouble with any Android related issues. The gist of it is setting up an emulator.

How the Code Works: There are two flows the user can use.

• The first is texting to control the device. A broadcast receiver inside the manifest file sets up a BroadcastReceiver for text messages. The listener is defined in SMSRequestManager. It initializes a command manager to load up the commands and then parses the body of the text into a command. It then calls the execute method of the appropriate command passing in the args.
• The second is interacting with the app settings by opening it up. The class to look for is MainActivity which directs the user to the settings activity or the whitelist activity. From there, look at the Settings or Whitelist class.

Refactoring opportunities:

• The Activity classes are a little all over the place. By the Single Responsibility Principle, they would just manage the UI and related events. The “back end” code that runs when the events happen in the UI should be refactored into different files.
• In the storage package, there is some boiler plate code that is necessary in order to use Room. That could be refactored into its own package.
• Ideally, settings should be reworked as we didn't get a chance to refactor it this quarter. It uses SharedPreferences to store the data which is okay but the frontend and backend are coupled together. Try and follow Single Responsibility Principle when refactoring it.
• Maybe look into how to switch from inheritance to composition for the command validators.

New features:

• Take a look under issues. Previous quarters have added a lot of fun issues that you can tackle. A lot of them involve looking at a new API like the Camera or reworking another feature. Use the Android docs/online tutorials as a resource to learn more about them. Always look up what features are supported on your min API level as that dictates which new features you can use.
• We didn't get a chance to write unit tests for our code. Please take a look into how to do that!

Advice

• The code is in app/src/main/java/com/konukoii/smokesignals. Using Android Studio is highly recommended to edit the code.
• Instead of using ant, you will use Gradle. Gradle uses build.gradle instead of build.xml. There are two build.gradles, a build.gradle in the root directory and app/build.gradle. If you are making edits you most likely want to edit app/build.gradle. You should only have to do this if you are updating dependencies or increasing the min API level for the app.
• The UI is constructed by the files in app/src/res/layout. If you are unfamiliar with this I’d take a look here
• Any strings/hardcoded values should go into app/src/res/values/strings.xml.
• Adding a command is relatively easy: update the string array in the strings file above and then create the appropriately named class in the commands package. See CommandManager.java for how that gets instantiated.

F16 Final Remarks

Currently, everything in the code that is a part of the implemented methods and implemented user stories works. The app compiles and runs and all of these functions return the correct output. Additionally, leniency has been implemented to make the commands less strict, so texting a variation of the commands will either provide the help text or still continue to work.

Potential features to be added: Besides the issues and features listed above, a few new issues that we added were

• Add feature that can make phone light flash on and off (useful for when user is searching for a lost phone or using the ring function)
• Improve UI by making the interface more visually pleasing by potentially using more of the empty white space, etc.
• Add a toggle to switch all features on or off so users don't have set them individually

Existing bugs:

• In whitelist, make sure to test and potentially modify the two different functions (SAVE and SAVE NUMBER) for adding numbers to the whitelist, because in making the whitelist less strict, bugs could have been introduced when adding numbers to the whitelist under different situations
• Again in whitelist, a bug that we didn't get around to fixing was that duplicate numbers are still added to the file

Opportunities for refactoring:

• You could try seperating the different functions that the application provides into seperate classes, in coordinance with the Single Responsibility design principle, so that adding new functions and making changes to existing functions doesn't require that you modify multiple parts of the SMSRequestManager class

Advice for working with code/legacy code in general:

• Start by looking at the Java files in the "app/src/main/java/com/konukoii/smokesignals" directory
• Then, check out the corresponding .xml files for the layout of the application in the "app/src/main/res/layout" directory
• Try to research and understand the different APIs that come with the code so that you can optimize the way you use the provided functions in the APIs
• Read the Android tutorial in the UCSB CS56 projects page
• Make sure that when you make in the Java portion of the code, you also change the layout in the .xml files if needed
• Good luck!