Shiro, Japanese Castles

Shiro, Japanese Castles is an Android application to allow people to discover Japanese castles.

I created this application to learn how Android is working and I think it’s really interesting. There are so many possibilities.

It was a lot of work to desing the DB and to enter all the information. To facilitate this process, I created a Java application to manage the DB. But even with that, that took a lot of time. The other long task was to get images for all the castles. There are more than 480 pictures.

Shiro application contains a lot of information about more than 120 castles. All this information was gathered from Japanese Castle Explorer and from some other Websites (Wikipedia, tourism information centers…).

All the pictures come from different sources: myself, Japanese Castle Explorer and Keisuke.

Main screen of the application. Divided into 4 tabs: random, viewed, visited, favorite. Each tab is a list of 10 castles that you can refresh by pulling down. If you have 15 castles in your visited list, then 10 random castles (among the 15) will show up. If you pull down, then another 10 random castles will appear.

Description page of a castle. You can click on the button “not visited” or “not favorite” to add it to the visited list or favorite list.

Map with the location of the castles. You can click on the icons to see more information.

Pictures of the catle. However this doesn’t work anymore. The images are stored on Dropbox but Dropbox has changed the way to access the public folder, so I need to work on it.