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The ultimate coder challenge is winding down and the contestants have made their penultimate post. Were it me doing the coding I'd still be at the planning stage, but well and truly ready to pull 7 all-nighters to get the thing done by next week's deadline. The six contestants are, however, made of sterner, or at least more organised stuff than myself.

Last week was the Intel Developer Forum so no blogs to review. Contestants and judges were too busy running around exhibit halls and consuming whatever freebies were available to do anything serious, though from the sounds of it secret elves back at home base kept the cauldrons bubbling. Nothing like a bit of tag team development.

So on to the challengers:

Lee looks like his app is fully baked. Actually Lee himself looked pretty baked in some of his IDF trip photos.

George & Suresh also seem to be at a good point with their app and they have added what I'd consider a killer Ultrabook feature to their app: NFC exchange of transactions from mobile devices to their MoneyBags Ultrabook application. This is the essence of what the Ultrabook enables: a completely new way of interacting with the device. It's not a computer that sits on your desk to do spreadsheets. It's a seamless part of your day and you interact with it in ways not possible with other devices. Well done, guys.

Shailesh discuss their experience in submitting their (desktop) app to the Intel AppUp store. One of the great features here is the in-App Unlocking API which enables unlocking additional game levels within an app. It's great to know these things are baked into the core.

John has waxed lyrical about what Ultrabooks mean. It seems like the week at IDF has enabled the contestants to understand completely the vision of Greg Welch, the father of the Ultrabook. Again, it's about providing an application that understands the context of the user. Where are they? How bright is it? Are they moving? What devices are near them? How is the user touching the device, and is he, as my hope has always been, about to try and kick the Ultrabook between a set of uprights on the footy field?

Sagar discuss their addition of GPS sensor info and multi touch. It's icing on the cake time for them.

Andreas discusses some touch additions to his app. He's using click events, but I can't help but wonder if touch and drag events would be more appropriate in this case. A click is an up/down event pair, whereas when you interact with a screen using touch it's often a down/hold/drag sequence. There are endless possibilities here but I guess I'll have to wait until next week.

They are close. They all seem pretty wrecked and/or extremely excited and wound up after IDF. Who can blame them.

One point I should make is that the units the developers, and us judges, are using are prototypes. They will never appear on a store shelf and are not what you would consider fully polished. Driver issues have been the biggest hurdle, as well as small issues between the versions of Windows 8 installed. Our units came with a version slightly earlier than the version available now, so the slight OS differences have also added to the excitement. This is truly living on the bleeding edge, but it's a very comfortable, well crafted, with a really nice rubbery cover on the top bleeding edge. We really don't do bleeding edges like we used to.

cheers,
Chris Maunder

The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP