Slash Roots Caribbean Developers spit out 4 Mobile News Reader Apps in 54 hour Code Sprint

The Code Sprint

Recently, there has been a lot of attention on mobile development in the local and regional context. There are a number of mobile app developer competition, such as the Jamaican Ministry of Education Blackberry App Competition and the St Vincent and The Grenadines iCreate Mobile App competitions.

So Matthew McNaughton, Founder of Slash Roots Developer Community decided to stage a Mobile Development Code Sprint on June 3rd. Here’s the breakdown.

Goal
The aim of this code sprint is to create and implement a mobile news reader application that consumes the RSS feeds of local/Caribbean news papers and implement it across multiple platforms and build up a body of knowledge that persons both new and seasoned in mobile development can utilize. This idea was inspired by the very popular CSS Zen garden ( www.csszengarden.com ). Persons can choose any or all of the RSS news feeds listed below and implement a news reader on a mobile platform.

RSS Feeds
* Jamaica Gleaner (Top Stories) — http://jamaica-gleaner.com/feed/lead.xml
* Caribbean News Now (Top stories) — http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/news/_files/rss/news/Caribbean-News-Now!-Daily-Headlines.xml
* Caribbean Net News (Country filters) — http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/rss.php
* Caribbean 360 — http://www.caribbean360.com/feed/index.1.rss
* Nation News — http://www.nationnews.com/site/feed/

The Coders who were in the Sprint
Wayne Jones ( Jamaica)

Matthew McNaugton ( Jamaica)

Shannon Clarke ( Barbados)

Rory Walker  ( Jamaica)

The Results

You can read the mobile news reader for the Blackberry, iPhone and Android users who want to read Jamaican news on the go.

Blackberry App #1 :
Download:http://groups.google.com/group/slashroots/browse_thread/thread/fdd3bdc4ef240886

Blackberry App #2:
Download: http://www.screenr.com/g9Ts

iPhone App :
Download: http://groups.google.com/group/slashroots/browse_thread/thread/dd09b25909c97246
The Android App is almost done.

Please download, use and give feedback to the coders and join the community.
W: www.slashroots.org
List: http://groups.google.com/group/slashroots ← JOIN the mailing list!
Tw: www.twitter.com/slash_roots

slashroots.org

What is Slash Roots?
./roots is a Caribbean software developer community. We organized the ./roots/DEV Software Developer Conference which was held February 24-25th 2011. The conference was attended by over 500 attendees. At the conference we also, had our first code sprint, in which more than 50 developers participated in. Our goal is to raise the profile of local software development. Overall, we just like coding. We also have a mini web-series SlashRoots TV which you can check out on www.siliconcaribe.tv