Day 21 – Project Transit Notifier
To do:Continue working on mocking my data, Unit testing & UIWhat I did: Over the weekend, I asked support on Facebook and Twitter for coming up with a name for my app. I had tons of great suggestions: 
My sister's husband, Thomas, twitted "Best one I could think of is: Rideminder..."I really like it. Thanks Thomas!This morning lecture was about making our web apps to be visually appealing and Heather, an instructor, gave us tons and tons of resources. I was inspire to drop my mocking of data and testing to go off and do some fun UI!
One of my big considerations is making my app as accessible to persons with physical and mental challenges. I looked up color palettes that are good for persons who are colorblind. I decided to use blues and yellows because they are easier to see for different types of colorblindness.
Now off to my font. I really wanted to use a font that is large for users that have visual challenges and I wanted to utilize a font that helps people with dyslexia. I found a couple of fonts and I decided to go with http://opendyslexic.org/ and I love it! I changed my font color that is black to a dark grey to make it easier on the eyes as well. Its coming along!
Now onto my testing. Over the weekend I thought that instead of making an object or jsonifing my data, why don't I use my firebase account and mock my data using that. This sounds great! The only thing is at the moment I only know how to change the data on my personal firebase is through javascript on a html page. Hmm... I did the suggested firebase demo to remind me how to do it (its been over three weeks since I played with it). I did that and I passed into the chat system a couple of values to mimic my data and it didn't come out right, so I passed in the dictionary that I had made last week.. nope... hmm... so I went into the firebase dashboard and I manually started playing around with the name/value input. I figured out that if I pass in a list, it'll place each item of the list as a different value for the name. Which is what I wanted. So I spent about an hour and half working on getting my data structure just like the transit (the first one had capital Route, instead of route and the the second one didn't have sf-muni).
Now that I have my mock data structure, I had to figure out how to change the namespace of my process_data.transit_firebase to linked to my mock firebase during testing. I got a little loss with this, but I was able to figure it out! Now I can finish my testing!To do Tomorrow: Work on finishing testing!
My Thoughts/Process: I got into making my web app look nice and it was really fun to learn how to make my site more accessible to persons with challenges. I am so happy that I figured out how to mock my data, I knew I could do it, it just took my brain a little longer than normal. I think its a sign that I need to take a break. Working on the same thing for this long is more taxing than I thought - especially since is the first time I have really work on programming project. I feel so proud to be in this space. Things are coming together! But I do need a rest, I'll be leaving to Fresno tomorrow and I am looking forward to a couple of days of sleeping, relaxing and hanging out with my partner, dog and cat.