Coding Smackdown at WIPJam MWC: See The Apps Our Contestants Built In Three Hours!
At our WIPJam at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in February, we held a Coding Smackdown in which four teams of developers had just a few of hours to come up with an application to see whose skills and tools reign supreme. Participants were tasked with building a connected media application to help WIP members interact. The constraints were—obviously—the time and that participants couldn’t bring any code into the event, just commercially available APIs and libraries, and their app had to run on multiple devices.
This was no mean feat! Four teams had signed up to the event, representing Enough Software, MoSync, Nokia and OMTP joined at the last minute by Simon Maddox, catching everyone by surprise by jumping out from the audience. They all stepped up to the challenge, taking on their wrestler-inspired nicknames (no one accepted to wear a wrestler's costume), and cranking out apps. While Enough was the winner according to a show of hands from WIPJam attendees, the results from all of the teams were impressive, given how little time they had to work.
Below, we’ve listed out each team’s submission (in alphabetical order), and some details about it, as well as links to their apps so you can check them out on your own device.
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Smackdown Contestant 1: Andre “The Giant” Schmidt, Enough Software
- Development environment: Eclipse/J2ME Polish |
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Smackdown Contestant 2: Anders “Mad Mullet” Malm, MoSync - Development environment: MoSync IDE - Summary of the app: A Twitter client which lists the 10 latest tweets that have ‘#wipjam’ in them. You can also post tweets in it. If you forget the ‘#wipjam’, it’s added for you! The application also has two colored screens, a green ‘like screen’ and a red ‘dislike screen’. Those screens should be used during the WIPJam so that you can show directly what you think about whats being said at the stage. So, if someone says something that you don’t like, just show him/her the red screen! If you like, show the green screen! - Compatible platforms: JavaME, Android, Moblin, S60 3rd Edition, can be built for Windows Mobile and S60 2nd and 5th Editions using MoSync - Source code/app download: Source code | JavaME | S60 3rd Edition | Moblin (deb package) | Android 1.5 - Lines of code: 1026 File size: 117KB-330KB, depending on platform |
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Smackdown Contestant 3: Adriano “BladeRunner” Rezende, Nokia Technology Institute - Development environment: Emacs/Linux - Language: Qt (QGraphicsView) - Dependencies: Libraries IMTK and IMTKMAP - Summary of the app: A Twitter client with geolocation that displays Twitter messages on a map. - Compatible platforms: Symbian touchscreen devices and Nokia N900 - Source code/app download: Here - Lines of code: 836 - File size: 79KB |
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Smackdown Contestant 4: Toby “Ybot” Ealden, OMTP - Development Environment: BONDI - Summary of the app: The idea is to combine cloud-based and device-based messaging in a person-centric way. So when you click on a contact from your address book, the widget displays all the messages (sms, e-mail, twitter, facebook etc) from that person, in date order. - Compatible platforms/devices: Any BONDI device, currently Android, LIMO, Samsung Wave and Windows Mobile implementations - Source code/app download: - Lines of code: about 300 lines of Javascript - File size: 15KB |
Unfortunately Mad Duck Simon failed to comply with the multi-platform rule of the smackdown and had to be taken out by the judge for sticking to his iPhone, but you can contact him at http://www.simonmaddox.com/ to find out more...
As we said show of hand on the day gave Andre "The Giant" Schmidt as the winner... but with the code now in the open it's time for the popular vote to be cast... Tell us your thoughts!!