Oz Birds

Overview screen
Detail screen top
Detail screen bottom
Quiz screen question
Quiz screen answer

Inspiration

In 2014 I was on a holiday trip at the east coast of Australia where I stayed for 4 weeks. I was fascinated by the many animals and especially bird species I had never seen before. My camera was always at hand to capture all impressions of my vacation. During this trip I took about 4000 photos and made around 300 videos to always be able to remember every part of this journey. Later when sorting out the good captures I noticed how many different bird species I had photographed and filmed. So I got the idea to develop an app for introducing all these birds I had seen including their names and a short description. That was the start for the development of Oz Birds.

What it does

With Oz Birds you can discover unique birds you have never seen before. It is a collection of photos, videos and sounds from many native birds only living in Australia and New Zealand. Listen to the bird sounds while discovering the pictures and reading interesting facts. Learn something about the characteristics, the behavior and the habitat of all 36 featured birds. You can watch some short videos and even test yourself with a little quiz.

How I built it

The app is completely built using native Android code, along with some small libraries making my life easier.

Challenges I ran into

Loading the many images efficiently was a big challenge that kept me busy for a long time. Even after scaling the pictures according to the device resolution and lazy-loading them with a ViewSwitcher didn't completely solve my problem. The biggest impact had the move of the files to the folder drawable-nodpi so that the Android system didn't try to optimize the pictures itself, working against my implemented algorithm. Another challenge was to figure out all the bird names of the creatures visible in my pictures. To accomplish that I had to go through hundrets of bird pictures on different websites, comparing them with my own ones and noting the name.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of having managed to load all the images efficiently, in the ListView as well as on the details pages. I also like the app for representing and including all of my hobbies, from photography and videography to designing the interfaces and programming all the code.

What I learned

I learned a lot about image processing in Android, as well as playing and controlling sounds, managing screen transitions and using Fragments and lazy-loading in an Android app.

What's next for Oz Birds

The next steps are to finish the description texts about all the birds (21 of 36 are done) and to include an options screen where you can decide if the sounds should play when opening the details page. I also want to improve the display of the images so that they can be zoomed if the user wants to.