This week was half spent at work and the other half in Cambridge attending a BlackBerry Jam Camp. At CDOT, we’ve fallen into a pattern that I think will continue for the next few weeks – Ystallonne will be working on designing the layout of the individual pages and I’ll be hooking the pages up so they interact with the database. We’ve had a lot of discussions centering around accessibility and how accessible our website will be. Supposedly next year every website of a government sanctioned institution will need to be accessible. Because we’re making a website for Seneca College this means that we have to make it accessible as well. What we don’t know, and will likely have to look into in the coming weeks, is what exactly has to be accessible and how accessible it needs to be. For now we’re going to try to make all of our components tabbable and some navigable using the arrow keys. I’ve started working on getting the log in page working again, but due to some changes in how we connect to the database, it’s proven to be trickier than expected. There’s also some functionality I need from the database that’s not yet available so I’ll have to talk to Bo about that next week.
On Tuesday BlackBerry drove Ystallone, Andrei (another CDOT employee) and myself up to Cambridge for the BlackBerry Jam Camp, an event focused on teaching students how to develop applications for BlackBerry 10 devices. It was a phenomenal experience and one that I wish other companies would endorse. They covered everything from installing and setting up the SDK to actually writing a basic app using either HTML5 or native code. If we write an app and have it approved and submitted to BlackBerry World by September, we even get a free phone! The event drew people from all over North America – a  military reserve student from New Hampshire, a student from Alberta, and other students from all over Ontario. There’s a larger overarching competition that promises to send the winner of the best app-sensation to Orlando for the massive BlackBerry Jam conference. I’ve made a team with Ystallonne and two other students I met during the camp and we’re really excited to start working on our idea. We want to create a system to link BlackBerry users with BlackBerry developers to create the apps that users want. Hopefully I’ll even be able to incorporate some gamification elements đŸ˜€