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The final round of updates has come so it's time to see what the developers have produced. Actual judging starts this week and until I sit down with the score card I'll keep my comments light and breezy.
Lee is done and his app takes advantage of an extraordinary array of Ultrabook functionality. Messaging, movement sensors, location, light sensors, the webcam, multi touch, graphics (to an insane degree), parallel coding, communications as well as a nice foray into InApp purchases. This is a man possessed. This is a man who needs sleep.
George and Suresh have summed up their 6 week journey with a few demo's of their app. 6 weeks, day in, day out, and they are done, with the added benefit that they get to demo via recorded video, rather than the traditional live demo that worked 100 times during rehearsal and failed in front of a studio audience. They have also covered a great issue regarding packaging and distribution. The standard dev way of distributing a Metro, sorry, Windows Store, app is via an installer power by PowerShell. It's very, very clunky so improvements in this area get them brownie points. They too have hit the gamut of Ultrabook features, so testing will be fun.
Shailesh at Clef Software is likewise done and their app is currently going through the store verification process. Ah, gotta love red tape. Although, you gotta love apps that are certified to be virus and malware free, too.
John has wrapped up with a plea to us hard, unforgiving and downright cynical judges that it's all about the experience, and not about the technical excellence of the code. As a coder I'm immediately offended. Technical Excellence or Die! As a user, and as a coder who has 9 million other coders constantly, unrelentingly, passionately picking apart my application, I totally and utterly agree. The pursuit of technical excellence can lead to a truly awful solution, because devs often forget that users are an integral part of the requirements.
Sagar provides a brief discussion of their use of always-on / always-connected. Again we're hearing of driver issues, and again the guys, like others, have spelunked into territory angels fear to tread and done a little driver hacking. I live for the day that drivers are a thing of the past.
Andreas has posted his final post on his efforts to convert a HTML5 app to the new Windows 8 UI design. No code or sample apps for now, so full judging will have to wait until next week.
So no more contestant blogs, and one final round of judging to go.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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