Chris Cowdery

Seekqr is a year-long project I started with Sean Madden, Sherman Lee and Brian Murphy for an entry into the Student Contest in Software Engineering (SCORE) 2011 competition (specifically the “QR Marks the Spot” project division). The project was initially started to showcase usability principles in cross-platform mobile application for the Engineering Methods of Software Usability (SE444) course, but has been extended to the competition.

Two months ago we had our first milestone release, and so far we’re really pleased with how the project has come together so far. We’ve got a lot up our sleeves, so stay tuned!

If you’re interested, here’s an excerpt from our initial blog post:

Hey and welcome to the dev blog of ‘; DROP TABLE Students; –!

Here you’ll be able to find posts relevant to our discoveries, hardships, findings and more as we carry forward with the development of our QR Code Game Framework for the 2011 SCORE Contest; spewe’ll be working on the QR Marks the Spot challenge.

This past few week we’ve been mostly keeping our heads down with configuration management, requirements and design for the project. The scope and design of the project has undergone some exciting transformations this week, and it’s really nice to see everything gaining momentum. To begin with, I’d like to share some of my findings from this week:

Workflow

A lot of exciting things have happened this week for our workflow, both internally and externally.

• We’re the proud new parents of an ActiveCollab instance, which is proving to be excellent for keeping the team on track. Not only does it tie in directly with our repository, it also gives us great metrics like burndown, schedule of deliverables, ticket tracking, and plenty of communication options. We highly recommend ActiveCollab for small to mid-sized software development teams for these reasons. Check it out!
• We’re trying really hard to be hip. We’ve got a Twitter account which we’ll be posting some of the spur-of-the-moment updates on the project, so be sure to follow us if you’re interested in some of the finer grained details.
• A classy new WordPress blog! Not only do we have a classy new theme, we’re also going to try and put some stellar content here (could happen!) as the project progresses. Glad you found us!
• We’re hopping on the Git bandwagon. We have a lot of Subversion and Mercurial vetrans on the team, but we’d like to take this opportunity to learn something new – so we’re diving head first into Git, and so far so good!

Platform

One of the requirements for our project was that it must be able to run on a mobile device; however some (polite) holy wars arose when trying to pick a specific platform to implement the project in. After some research and talking with friends, we’re currently pursuing Titanium.

Titanium has a very interesting approach to the multi-platform dilemma – it enables developers to create a rich web application using Javascript which later compiles into a native app for your device of choice. What sets Titanium apart however is that its API provides an abstract way of interfacing with platform-specific APIs; a simple call to Titanium’s API for the device’s camera (for example) will invoke different code for the Apple iPhone than it will for Google Android devices.

Is this a silver bullet for application development? Perhaps. It’s exceedingly difficult to replicate the entire breadth of functionality that a native API has to offer – but Titanium exceeded our initial expectations. With this framework, we’ll be able to rapidly prototype UI designs building off of existing Javascript libraries like MooTools and JQuery. This also let’s us do heavy data crunching on the client and the server when the time comes. Very cool.

That more or less sums up the activity this week for the team. Please don’t hesitate to leave any of your thoughts in comments. Stay tuned!

Next week we’ll be getting our hands dirty with:

• Diving more into Titanium
• Developing a WBS
• Creating wireframes for UI
• Brainstorming for some swanky names for our project

If you’re interested in the development of Seekqr, swing by the team blog at http://blog.seekqr.com/.