Fancy List
Language
Java
Basic Description
In my junior year I took a class called Advanced Programming Projects, where I worked with a team of three others on a variety of projects. Our first project was Fancy List, an application made in Java. The basic idea was to create a program that would allow the user to create a variety of fun and interesting lists with each list item completely customizable. The project was a bit too ambitious, and we ended up stopping halfway through with a functioning but incomplete project.
What I Learned
This project was my most complete shot at a working application, as well as the only school project I truly worked on in a group. Working in a group taught me a lot about the value of being able to speed up production by delegating tasks and how unreliable other programmers can be. I learned all about the Java Graphical User Interface and saving and loading files.
Favorite Part
Each list item can have a different font and color. Adding and removing items based on user input required the list to actually be a Java Table, but it was extremely difficult to get individual table rows to have different colors and fonts. I spent about a month researching ways to do this until I found that I could store the data in table columns that were invisible, and so I am the most proud of that.
Remaining Flaws
Fancy List isn't nearly as powerful a program as we had hoped to create at the start, but lack of enthusiasm from other group members shelved it. The biggest flaw I still see is that the top dropdown menus don't change to the proper values when a user switches the selected list item.