S-STEM Scholar Andre Ta's Blog

      Unfortunately, I have been stumped on the direction I want to take my application after seeing similar ones fail, but I've been on a huge technology kick just researching a lot about new products that are coming out and how they are changing the future of how we experience things. The most recent thing I've been researching is OLED screens. Nowadays, OLED has become a staple in almost every single field that involves a screen of some sort. Nintendo just recently released their OLED Nintendo Switch. Samsung's latest phones have all included an OLED screen to complete with Apple's Liquid Retina Pro Displays. Even TVs are adopting OLED and evolving it from OLED to QD OLED.            According to an article by Hong Jae Shin and co., OLED stands for organic light-emitting diodes. This means that each diode or pixel on a screen emits its own light. This differs from regular LED or even mini LED because they require backlight to showcase...

      I did a lot of personal research this week about something that absolutely blew my mind. There was a smartphone that released earlier this year that had all of the standard specs that someone could ask for in a phone; 5000mAh battery, HDR10+, 108MP main camera, and a Snapdragon 888 processor. All of this sounds amazing in a phone, but the thing that blew me away is the fact that the company that created that phone, Xiaomi, somehow figured out a way to safely incorporate fast charging of up to 120W.     Just to put that into perspective, an article by AppleInsider did multiple tests to see how fast Apple's iPhone 13 Pro Max charged with their 30W charger. According to their tests, Apple's phone charged from 0 to full in about 86 minutes with their charger maintaining about 27W for about 30 minutes and then caps off at 22W for the rest. For comparison, both phones use a Lithium-ion battery and both phones are roughly the same size with the iPhone having a 6....

    This week I wanted to keep improving my Java skills. I continued my Udemy course by John Purcell and watched his lecture on utilizing random class on Java. In his lesson, he utilized the the random class by creating Hangman in Eclipse but I wanted to try and use the random class with my own code from scratch. I figured the best way to learn the random class and to keep it simple would be to create a dice via Java.      It is a fairly simple project but it let me try something new and let me experiment with the random class and importing different items in Java. I had to begin the code by telling Java that I want the object DiceRoll to be Random after that I needed to initialize x, which could be labeled anything, and to have it be within the range of 1 to 6. If I were to change the line int x = DiceRoll.nextInt(6) + 1; <-- to int x = DiceRoll.nextInt(10) + 5 It would make the dice roll start at 5 instead of 1 and make the dice roll any number from 5 to 15...

 This week I decided to take a break from working on my application to focus on developing my coding skills. I took up on creating a GUI or graphical user interface. I believe this to be one of the more important skills that I can learn as a software engineer. I built my code within EclipseIDE.  As I started building my code, I used a JFrame to build the initial size of the window I wanted to show. I also added  frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); frame.setTitle("GUI"); frame.pack(); frame.setVisible(true); and this allowed me to set the window to fully close when exited, name the window, made the window match a certain size, and make the window visible. After that, I wanted to add something simple to give the window a purpose so I added the code to create a button. The button didn't do anything at first so I thought what would be something simple but fun to do. I made the window a bit larger to accommodate more text and a button. After that, I ...

      With the direction that I want to go with my application, I figured iOS or Apple's software is the best way to go due to uniformity with it's software and according to an article by Statista, around 47% of smartphone users in the US use an iPhone. To me, this is a good start to building because I will only have to focus on coding and designing the UI for one operating system instead of Androids' numerous operating systems. After deciding what operating system I wanted to develop the application on, I needed to find and research what IDE to use. That was simple for me because after doing a quick google search, I found out that Xcode is that Apple actually supports directly on their developer website and it is also freeware so I won't have to invest a large sum of money to get started.     Next, I had to figure out what are the next steps to being able to create the app. According to the book "Learning iPhone Programming: From Xcode to App Store", they rec...

 This week I decided to give myself a refresher on Java since I haven't studied it heavily in a few months. I'm currently going through Java 11 For Complete Beginners by John Purcell on Udemy. So far in his lesson plan, he has talked about how Java compiles the code so that it can be used from computer to computer with no real issue. John has also ran through the very basics of how to print out different things.     System.out.println("Hello world!");  That's the famous first line of code that every beginner to coding learns. Although it may be slightly different depending on language, the concept is the same. The course is also teaching the fundamentals of code like creating integers and variables to be used throughout the code. They can incorporated into different kinds of arithmetic depending on my needs.      int cats = 7;     int dogs = 5;     int total = cats + dogs;     System.out.println(total);  This small bl...