Project Requirements

The project brief document outlined that the focus of the program is to allow a user to input a recipient's phone number, and send that recipient a text message, a video, image or audio message, and give the user access to their contact history in both the inbox and outbox.

Development Process

For this project I decided to follow the OOP (object oriented programming) methodology. OOP is a programming paradigm that is based around objects, reusable pieces of code. They are then used to create different instances of objects using existing classes and calling methods to access and modify data that is stored within the objects.

After examining the program specifications, I created a list of classes that will be the foundation of the program: Message class, SMS class, MMS class, ListboxItem class, and the Data class.

The Message class is the parent class to the SMS and MMS classes. It contains the Sender, Text, Status, IsGroupMessage and MMS properties. The SMS class is used for creating regular text messages and has no individual properties only ones inherited from the Message class. The MMS class represents all the media type messages. It has its own properties to allow sending different types of media: image, video and audio.

The ListboxItem class is used for separating the SMS and MMS messages. Finally the Data class is used for extracting the messages saved in the database to be loaded and read in the program.

Outcomes

The current program performs all the functionalities specified in the requirements, and with the features requested. Even though the project complies with the project specifications and requirements, there are functions that I would improve on in the future.

Currently the interface of the program feels a bit cluttered and might be overwhelming the users at first glance. Instead I would use a tabbed interface to separate the history from the messaging UI which would make for a much cleaner design. Otherwise I am pretty happy with the end result of the program.