Developing of e-textbook for android platform
Igor Čurk · PeFprints (University of Ljubljana) · 2013
Tablet computers are increasingly taking over the role of the personal computer. At first, people used them just to browse the web, play video games, watch movies, etc. With technological advances and the emergence of a large number of applications, tablet computers started to offer a vastly improved user experience and people started using them for many different purposes, including education. In our diploma thesis, we were developing an application for the Android platform, which allows us to share and read textbooks in electronic form. We started the diploma thesis with the presentation of the Android operating system, the Google Play store and the novelties of the Android operating system in versions 3.0 and higher. We also presented the structure of a basic application for the Android platform and descriptions of some applications from the online store which are meant and used for educational purposes. We continued with the presentation of electronic textbooks, described their development and presented some examples. The last two chapters are used to present the development and evaluation of the application. The first part describes the software architecture by describing individual classes. We continued with the description of the development of the main components of the application which allow us to transfer and save e-textbooks on our mobile device. We also presented the use of the internet communication and the display of the e-textbook on a device. The application has been tested by a smaller number of users on their mobile phones and tablet computers and their responses are gathered in the second part. Each user who tested the device has also received a short questionnaire. With the use of their answers, we were able to gather their opinion on the application and any technical difficulties they might have encountered. We were also able to create an overview of the application's performance and wrote down possible improvements.