Much like Jason, I too, am a budding Computer Scientist. I’ve been working in the industry for just over a year, studying the field for approximately five years, and programming for even longer. I have studied at two major Canadian universities, Carleton and Memorial, and have worked on both commercial and open source software with IBM. So now, after years of saying I would actually do it: I am starting a blog on software development, and in particular, mobile software development and UI design.
Like I said, most of my recent interest has been in mobile application development, particularly on the Android platform. Aside from that, I love designing and working with user interfaces. In fact, I am currently working with IBM on the Eclipse SWT project.
This internship has exposed me to the creation and manipulation of SWT-based applications, and has even given me a chance to work on an incubation project known as SWTBot. Working with SWTBot has given me a pretty decent grasp of concurrency and the synchronization needed between non-ui threads and an application’s UI thread. Essentially, the purpose of SWTBot is to hook into a Java application’s UI thread and pass in faked user-driven events, thus simulating a user that doesn’t actually exist. This can then be useful for functional, UI-driven testing, all based on the JUnit test framework: a proven, open source unit testing framework for Java.
All things aside, I will not be focusing on building automated test frameworks. Development for Android will be the center of my activity, so expect lots of writing on mobile application development from both Jason and I, on iPhone and Android development, respectively.
Josh
