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ROUGH UI Mockups and Project Analysis

Josh and I have been studying the specifics behind the project.  We pulled the following requirements for the BlackBerry app from the specification documentation....

1. A screen which displays the available tickets.
2. A summary screen for technician to review ticket
3. Ability to choose the technical complexity(h,m,l) of the ticket
4. Ability to choose if the required equipment is available for the ticket
5. Ability to select that the ticket has been acknowledged via a call,email,etc to the customer
6. Once the tech is customer facing, ability to verify tier of assignment
7. Once the tech is customer facing, ability to verify technical complexity
8. Ability to select that the fix process has begun
9. Ability to select that the fix process has completed
10. After the fix is completed, ability to select whether or not the customer accepted or denied training
11. After the fix is completed, ability to select whether or not the customer is satisfied with the fix.
12. Once the customer is satisfied with the fix and this has been indicated on the app, the ticket will be wiped from the phone

Next, we grouped the requirements together to decide which screen they would belong to...

Screen 1
#1

Screen 2
#2 - #4

Screen 3
#5

Screen 4
#6, #7

Screen 5
#8,#9

Screen 6
#10,#11

Here are some ROUGH mockups for the screens....

Screen 1

(apparently I can't spell ticket)

 



















Screen 2

Screen 3

Screen 4

Screen 5

The idea is that once the user submits a screen, the user is taken to the next screen (unless the ticket needs to be re-queued).  Also, if the user - for example - submits screen one and then closes the application, the next time the user opens the application and clicks on the ticket, screen two will pop up. 

We also considered the possibility of having a menu screen where the user can select which screen the user wants to navigate to.  Then, once the user submitted a screen, the link to the screen would be deactivated on the menu screen.

Feel free to post comments or we can discuss this further in person on a later day.

Hello World

I have successfully deployed a Hello World app to my BB simulator.  This tutorial was very helpful in guiding me to create this app.  For the most part, the basics behind BB development have been easy enough to pick up.  But I can already see what the hardest part of developing on BB is going to be - writing UIs. With Android, you can create the layout of a screen with xml.  It feels like creating a simple HTML web page.  BB screens are formatted through straight Java code.  This guide gives a pretty good introduction to creating UIs.  After creating the more advanced app that this guide uses ,I do feel like I'm getting my bearings with BB development.

Environment setup

Having previously developed apps on the Android platform, I had an idea of the general steps that would be involved in learning to develop for BB.  The first step is to set up your environment so that you can start learning/writing code for BB (obviously before this you need to have an updated jdk on your computer).  There is a BB plug-in for Eclipse which can be found here.  There are two options for installing this plug-in. You can install it directly into your current eclipse environment via the update site or you can download a full installer.  This full installer will install eclipse and the BlackBerry plug-in .  Long story short, using the update site did not work out for me so I ended up using the full installer.

The other tool I needed to download was a simulator to run BB apps on.  BB provides a wide variety of simulators.  You can choose the model, OS, and carrier for the simulator you want.  I ended up downloading a simulator for the Curve which I will use for testing for now as I'm not sure which phone model we are targeting.  BB simulators can be found here.

Finally, I have been following this guide in learning how to set up my environment and for beginning to write apps.