JourneyDiary

A native Android app for logging travels and everyday moments as diary entries. Built with Kotlin, currently in early scaffold stage.

Status

This is a fresh Android Studio scaffold, not yet a working diary app. The splash screen and app shell exist, but no diary functionality (creating, saving, viewing, or tagging entries) has been implemented. MainActivity currently renders a static "Hello World!" placeholder.

Known issue: MainActivity, not SplashActivity, is registered as the launcher activity in AndroidManifest.xml. The animated splash screen exists in code but is never shown on app launch — either add the MAIN/LAUNCHER intent filter to SplashActivity (and remove it from MainActivity), or wire up navigation from MainActivity to trigger it.

Features

• Animated two-image splash screen (fade transition) built with ImageView alpha animations
• Runtime location permission request (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION), laying groundwork for location-tagged entries
• Material Design theming with light/dark support (values-night)

Planned: diary entry creation and editing, local persistence, photo attachments, and location tagging per entry.

Tech Stack

Language	Kotlin
Min / Target / Compile SDK	16 / 34 / 34
UI	AndroidX AppCompat, ConstraintLayout, Material Components
Build	Gradle Kotlin DSL (build.gradle.kts), AGP 8.1.0
Testing	JUnit 4, Espresso

Project Structure

app/src/main/
├── java/com/example/journeydiary/
│   ├── splash.kt          # SplashActivity: location permission + fade transition
│   └── MainActivity.kt    # Current launcher activity, placeholder UI
└── res/
    ├── layout/            # activity_main.xml, splashscreen.xml
    ├── drawable/           # splash.png, bg.png, launcher icon
    ├── animator/           # fade_in.xml, fade_out.xml
    └── values(-night)/     # strings, colors, themes

Requirements

• Android Studio (Giraffe or newer recommended)
• JDK 8+
• Android SDK Platform 34

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo and open it in Android Studio.
2. Let Gradle sync (dependencies resolve from Google and Maven Central).
3. Run on an emulator or device (minSdk 16+).

Or from the command line:

./gradlew assembleDebug

Permissions

• ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION — requested on launch, ahead of location-based diary features that don't exist yet.

Note: the permission check in SplashActivity calls checkSelfPermission() unconditionally. That API requires SDK 23+, but minSdk is set to 16, so the app can crash on devices running Android 5.x/6.0 below API 23. Either raise minSdk to 23 or guard the call with a Build.VERSION.SDK_INT check.

Roadmap

• Fix launcher activity so the splash screen actually shows
• Guard the location-permission check for minSdk < 23
• Diary entry data model + local persistence (e.g. Room)
• Entry creation/editing UI
• Photo attachments
• Location tagging per entry

Contributing

Early-stage personal project. Issues and pull requests are welcome once core features land.

License

No license specified yet.