question about making an App for Android

[pyotr filipivich]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> on Fri, 11 Oct 2019 10:43:53 +1100
typed in comp.lang.python  the following:
>On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 10:40 AM pyotr filipivich <phamp at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> on Fri, 11 Oct 2019 09:49:03 +1100
>> typed in comp.lang.python  the following:
>> >On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 9:41 AM Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> >> On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 08:47:07 -0700, pyotr filipivich <phamp at mindspring.com>
>> >> declaimed the following:
>> >> >"A simple program" to divide the amount of "today's" daylight into 12
>> >> >even '"hours", so that Dawn begins the First hour, the third hour is
>> >> >mid-morning, noon is the middle of the day, the ninth hour mid after
>> >> >noon, and the twelfth hour ends at sunset.  Is simple, no?  {no.}
>> >>         Even ignoring "phone" this is anything but simple. It relies upon
>> >> knowing one's latitude and date to allow computing the angle of the sun.
>> >> And you'll need to handle the fact that above/below arctic/antarctic
>> >> circles you will run into "zeros" where there is either 24 hours of
>> >> daylight or 24 hours of night.
>> >Or.... maybe it's really simple, because there's an HTTP API that
>> >gives you the information. There's an API for everything these days. A
>> >quick web search showed up this:
>> >https://sunrise-sunset.org/api
>>         Thanks.
>> >Which means the project is a matter of taking the data and formatting
>> >it. (Also probably getting lat/long from the phone's location API.)
>> >I'd say this is a good-fun project - a one-week project for a student,
>> >a weekend project for an expert. And yes, there WILL be edge cases to
>> >deal with, but for the most part, it shouldn't be too hard.
>>         A one week project for a student. or Longer for a non-student.
>>         Oh well, as I say a lot: this wild be easy if I was doing it forty
>> hours a week.  And this part is a spin off of a larger mess, trying to
>> understand how astronomy was done before the invention of mechanical
>> clocks.  I get some off the wall inspirations.
>
>Sure, you can gauge your own skill level to get some idea of an actual
>timeframe.
	The programming skills have grown rusty.
>
>I'd recommend starting with a simple non-phone version of the idea,
>and then think about porting it to a phone. That should reduce the
>problem's complexity significantly.

	Or I could just "cheat" and make a mechanical clock which does the
same thing.  Maybe not as elaborate as the Japanese Myriad Year clock.
Something along the lines of what Masahiro Kikuno did with his
wristwatch. (18 million Yen, custom fitted to your latitude.)  but
adapted for "western" hours.
	The making is "easy", it is the engineering which is hard.
-- 
pyotr filipivich
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