Hagley College of Computing

Blackbay: Mobile Device Development

Speaker:
Brence Coghill
Date:
21 Jun 2007

We invited Brence to speak to the students about his work at Blackbay with mobile devices and about his experiences as a recent graduate. He also talked about Blackbay as a Microsoft partner giving the students a different perspective of the technology in use. Brence spoke briefly about the history of Blackbay, the products they sell and the type of companies they work with covering a number of the benefits and issues they have come across while developing their products. The students were shown demonstrations of the mobile interfaces and supporting web and desktop interfaces. Appealing well and truly to the target audience Brence then handed around a range of different mobile devices and demonstrated the ruggedness of one model by dropping it on the floor. The range of sizes and interfaces prompted discussion and allowed the students to explore the environments that some of these tools operate in. The students were eager to discuss the rationale behind Blackbay being Microsoft partners and using the languages that they do. This led to discussions about legacy issues with programming and requirements to update old code to make the product more robust and easier and faster to work with. We would like to thank Brence for his time and the insights he was able to offer the students both as a programmer in a local company and as a recent graduate.


Hagley Community College, 510 Hagley Ave, P.O. Box 3084, Christchurch, NEW ZEALAND