All assignments in this post are due by Thursday 2/5/09 9pm.
The assignments below fall under Mobile Development Methodologies:
- Technical advantages/disadvantages of mobile platforms in general (Tristan, Larry): The PA team is also researching the 3 platforms. I'd like the our team to take a different focus on this. Rather than focusing on the marketable features, I want to have technical details about each platform that affect development. This includes:
- The various user-agents mobile browsers report. There are more than 3. This includes all possible iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile user agents, as well as anything that may report a similar user-agent such as Opera, Android, or any of the plethora of browsers for the 3 devices. This is going to be important when we reach the development phase because it will be used for browser detection.
- Special technical abilities of any of the platforms (e.g., the iPhone's SQLite DB and proprietary meta-headers)
- Specific versions of XHTML, CSS, & JavaScript each platform support, including any bugs in their level of support of each version.
- Mobile design patterns (Matt, Alex): When developing for a mobile platform, there are some UI Design Patterns that work better than others. Although we have to try to mimic OnBoard's desktop UI in spirit, we need to make sure that as we develop the UI we have a good set of patterns for displaying information on a mobile device. Feel free to use examples from popular commercial sites if it conveys the message well, however make sure to include some research sources as well (case studies, standards bodies, reference sites). This includes:
- General UI design patterns for mobile devices for things such as: login, search, listing data, calendar scheduling, menu navigation, data entry, form validation, etc..
- Each device's UI standards. Apple (as well as Microsoft and Research In Motion) have a lot resources for recommended UI practices
- Mobile development best practices(Aaron, Steve): Developing for mobile devices comes with technical implications. Lighter weight pages, fewer web requests, etc. There are a lot of resources existing for best development practices. This is different from the previous assignment on the list, which is UI-focused. This is specifically about the technical implications of developing for mobile devices. Things like resource size, # of requests, site structure, etc. Standards bodies are the best place to go for this, however a lot of commercial sites & blogs have information about web optimization and related things.
In addition to these assignments, everyone will begin researching ASP.NET & C# to refresh their skills.
I've been working on a skeleton project of the site. I would like to have a basic login page, as well as some other fundamental web site features finished by the end of the week and sent out to the team to review.
For the next deliverable, I've asked my team to begin thinking about how their research topics will integrate with requirements for the project and making a list of requirements.
Open Issues
- The TPS Server still is not finished yet
- The BlackBerry & Windows Mobile devices have no VPN capabilities yet
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