Hello! My name is John, and I’m an application development intern working with BluBoard. Today, I’d like to share a little bit about an application I developed for the BluBoard: the NFL Scores app.
As the name implies, the NFL Scores app is a basic app built to display basic information about a single NFL game on a BluBoard. The information shown includes the teams, score, quarter and time remaining, date of the game and week of the NFL season, location of the game, and current weather conditions at the stadium. It packs a lot of information into a simple, easy-to-read display.
The functionality of the NFL Scores can be simplified to a few basic tasks:
- Pull NFL game data from a JSON library based on user inputs. The JSON is a library built from data provided by Stattleship, a third-party sports statistics API.
- Display the data in a BluBoard-friendly format on a webpage.
- Render the webpage to a blue and gray output, mimicking the BluBoard’s appearance. (For demonstration purposes, we built our sample app to output to a webpage rather than a BluBoard.)
Behind the scenes, the application uses jQuery to dynamically edit the page’s content, allowing the user’s input choices to appear neatly on the page. The webpage itself contains information provided by Stattleship and is rendered to blue and gray before being displayed below the user’s input. The visual design of the webpage is handled mostly via CSS, with one exception: the weather icons are custom-developed SVG images that are chosen in the application’s Javascript files based on what the JSON data says the weather conditions were at the time of the game.
In summary, the JSON provides information about the game, Javascript and jQuery are used to place that information on a HTML webpage, and CSS is used to change what the information looks like on the page.
The application is a basic sample of how a BluBoard can be used in a commercial setting. BluBoards are perfect solutions for displaying static data in a visually-appealing fashion. It is worth noting that NFL scores change relatively slowly and do not change once the game is done, making score data perfect for displaying to a Bluboard.
My idea for building this application was sparked by a pretty common occurrence: you’re sitting at a bar with your friends, having a beer and watching a football game on TV, when you realize you didn’t catch if your team won earlier that day. Instead of waiting for the tiny score ticker on the bottom of the screen to show the game you want (which can take a long time depending on the TV network) or having to load a mobile app and use mobile data to find the score, the bar has a few BluBoards conveniently displaying scores from throughout the day.
The sample application output described above displays the score of a single game based on a user’s input. However, with the BluBoard’s ability to schedule changes in displayed image, a user would be able to schedule any combination of scores to be displayed. For instance, a user can display results of a single team’s games as a season continues. Or a user can display only games played by teams in a certain division or geographic area. That way, the needs of any customer can be satisfied.
I wanted to make an application that could solve this problem and look good doing it, as well as show the utility of the BluBoard. BluBoards are powerful tools, able to display a huge variety of data and images beyond simple schedules, calendars or itineraries. And, with a little know-how, they can do so in an attractive way.
