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Chris, i want to apologize on behalf of all of the sane contestants and tell you that you have done an incredible job. Thanks! Sorry some people take pleasure in putting others down and are attempting to influence the outcome of the judging.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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I am sure not many here had any experience with AppUp prior to this competition. The contest gave us an opportunity to work on a technology that "might" change computing in time to come. All here have put hard work. So rather than fighting on issues like what prizes you won, look for the greater picture.
1. As new ultrabooks are sold, we are the only developers (say 1000 approximately all over the world?) who has the resources to tap the potential and come up with great products?
2. Make a product that people actually need and will use. They will refer to their friends and so on. Contest money is one time. Think on commercial aspect and you can earn from your app for times to come. It will give you a lot of space to be an entrepreneur( I am sure many of us hate 9-5) day job. Who knows you can be the founder of next Rovio?
3.You have a device worth $1500 or more and it makes you get noticed in crowd.
And you have an edge over rest of the developers. You are here as first few. Asus, Intel, Accer, Sony, Dell are leaving no stones turned for hyping ultrabook. Just think of 1 Million sales of Ultrabook and 1% using your App at $3.99?
Cheers and enjoy life. Everybody works hard, everybody has hurdles, everybody fights for a better life, and that is what life is all about.
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Well Said @Grasshopper.iics
This competition has given us so much...a 1500$ device which is a very mean machine, a code signing certificate worth 200$ and as you said potential to do and create the amazing.
For those who are complaining look here and think what is your next application
Thanks chris and intel
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We've all had fun, and we have all, from you guys all the way up to the guys working all day and all night at Intel to process the apps, have had a crazy, sleepless, stressful, but exciting time.
There have been ups and downs, and there have been near misses and miracle saves and sometimes that's how the dice lands.
I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. So, Thank You.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Thanks Chris for such an event and it has made the starter programmers like us to dream big.Its not about you win or lose its for one thing that everybody contributed is the most proudest feeling.Look in such a small time(Contestants) what you have done... and achieved(commendable) .Stay focussed(Contestant) and you can achieve a lot.Thanks Chris and the whole Codeproject team again to put such commitment to put an event together.Looking forward for future events.. and also 3 kudos to every contestant who put in extraordinary effort for this event.
Abhishek Nandy
A small step to moon a giant leap for mankind.
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I'm not sure I've seen much evidence of people putting others down or attempting to influence the outcome. This seems a bit premature.
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Are the first 50 Apps submitted on the appupstore will be listed today???
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We've all had fun doing this and we're having a couple of meetings today to go through the final stages of the contest and to have a good chat over a couple of ales about what went right, what went pear-shaped, what we would do different next time and (mainly) what we most enjoyed and got out of the contest.
If there are any questions you'd like me to ask, or feedback you'd like to provide, then let me know.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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I suppose the biggest problem for me was the speed of validation of apps, and the quality/speed of feeding information back. As Intel look to ramp up the AppUp store, they need to be able to turn validation around quicker. TimeZones play a large part here, with results potentially taking up to 36 hours from initial posting to getting feedback - and in the case of failures, there's another 36 hour delay and so on, and so on.
Too many people seem to have submitted their apps in time, and then heard nothing.
Another complaint seems to have been that there was an uneven playing field with people submitting apps that they have previously worked on (I'm thinking here of at least one entrant from the original Ultrabook competition). This naturally puts people at a disadvantage.
What worked well. I would like to pay particular attention to Meghana Rao. She was nothing short of exceptional, and Intel should be very proud of her. Please pass my regards on to them about her.
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Spot on, on two accounts in my opinion.
1. Many thanks indeed to Meghana Rao for help in turning round the certification nightmare.
2. Pitting a newly started project against an already-completed app is very difficult. Entrants starting fresh won't have any chance of reaching the same quality in a short time frame. That said, I'm hoping the judging will focus on the heart of the competition, which is the degree of innovation and how it shows off the particular device. To me, porting an existing app to a new platform isn't an act of innovation unless in doing so it redefines both the app and the platform. In this way a high budget app may be superb, but largely miss the point, and therefore not necessarily triumph over a simple build which nails an innovative idea. I hope - but then I'm biased because I didn't have something already!
On top of this, here are some other remarks on the competition in general.
1. Really grateful for the chance to take part in a competition so vast - loads of entries, massive prizes - not just the size of some prizes, but the sheer number of Ultrabooks handed out will have really helped a large number of developers up their game for that platform.
2. I understand both sides with regards to the verification process. I think what might make it work is longer timescales for the competition in general. With more comfortable development deadlines there would be much longer to overcome fundamental hurdles such as developing for a new OS as well as hardware aspects (sensors, etc.).
3. Sort of the same as 2, but more time in general. I appreciate the sponsor will want a ROI ASAP, but most developers will only be putting in some of their free time which means a handful of hours a week. I forget how many weeks there were to code - maybe 8? That's roughly the equivalent of 2 weeks' full time hours, which is feasible for either small utilities or demos, but difficult to do a competitive game in, for example. I'm sure everyone will be judged on their merits, but equally all parties involved want the best quality apps possible and that does take time.
4. Great community buzz. I dread to think how tired CP staff will be, but it was a great feeling to have everyone coding together. Seeing the articles, ideas, obstacles, and now the final products.
5. I can understand the reason for the early bird bonuses, but it perversely encourages you to submit a less-finished app in favour of something more polished. There will only be 7 winners, and you can bet the rest who aren't in that first 50 will kick themselves for not just rushing it to take the money. Obviously those with ready-finished apps are quids in, too. I guess that's the sponsor's discretion but I would suspect there'd be an inverse relationship, ready-finished apps excluded, between submission time and quality. Feel free to shout "project management!" at me.
6. Overall, I'm physically exhausted by the experience (2x weeks of 1:30am bedtimes) but loved every minute. More, please! (Maybe, not for a month or two, though!)
EDIT: One other thought - our app was rejected for failure to put the trademark symbol on the Ultrabook brand name in the meta data. I, and I'm sure most other developers, would presumably prefer to delegate basic permission to edit / tweak simple things like this to Intel. Rather than reject the app, just stick the trade mark symbol on it and pass it, rather than send it back through the cycle. It shouldn't take multiple professionals (i.e. myself and Intel combined) 24hrs+ to add a single character to a piece of text. That said I'm grateful it didn't mean resubmitting the binary, and it was passed fairly quickly the 2nd time around.
Check out my App Innovation contest submission: Celerity.
It's a sensor-driven head-tracking virtual reality tunnel game in C#.
modified 4-Dec-12 16:41pm.
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Great comments Adam. I think quite a few people got hit by the trademark omission rejection, and I agree with you that such a small error could be easily remedied by the reviewer rather than rejecting the app entirely. My rejection came one day before the deadline and I wasn't aware I didn't need to submit a new binary to make the correction; luckily Intel managed to get it approved just in time.
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Great Review,
Again i see honest review too you said yourself being biased for not having built apps. I also see lot of metro apps which are designed and ready are being ported to appup but its ok as they all play by fair rules. We also had a similar thought when we participated in a previous competition where we have to face with an app which has evolved over many years and has a huge team behind it, end of the day we lost but we appreciate that as that's the rule irrespective of the small team we had, much lesser time and creating a huge app was not easy but its all in game and we faced it and learnt many things out of it.
This time we have made fresh apps built from scratch connected with the category and worked like anything even though the competition rule never says new apps we made it to be innovative mostly.
End of the day whoever deserves and which apps are best in category will win and who ever wins we will wish them and ofcourse others will have a dejection and a different point of view but yet ground rules are same for everyone and every developer worked like anything to achieve this none of them are corporate gaints. Be it creating new apps for that category or porting an existing app for that category let the best app win. ( Even though we have built new )
Best Wishes
Thanks
Suresh
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First of all, thank them for doing this competition, it was realy fun to participate in!
As for feedback, the certification process was a total pain to get working, luckily after contacting intels suport ("which has been realy helpfull"), comodo fixed there stuff and I got my ceritficate.
Also, like I posted in my question a day ago, I have not recieved any confirmation of my entry yet, something that a lot of other people seems to have recieved. Should I be worried about that?
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Have a look at your dashboard and see what the status of your app is there.
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Oh, maybe I shouldn't have posted that question in the same message. My 2 apps are already submitted and validated in the app upp store. However, I have not recieved any confirmation about me being entered into the judging which it seems like most other people have.
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First of all my gratitude towards intel, Thank Them From My Side
Next time please ask the Intel guys to interact in our articles, Their suggestions can be of great help in making quality apps
Regards,
Febin John James
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The other issue that people seemed to have (apart from the Comodo one) was the issue with the GPS not working properly. As several people had GPS as a central part of their app, this was a big issue for them.
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thx to the Intel for two things.
(i) For sharp imagination to inspire all PC manufactures to develop a new category of PC called Ultrabook.
(ii) For providing developer a great platform to show what they are.
Thanks once again Intel.
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I submitted my app on the day of the deadline, Nov. 21. It was rejected once on 11/27. I submitted a fixed version of it the same day and it went back into "validation in progress" mode.
The app was finally validated on the second go - but unfortunately three days after the Dec. 1 deadline -- so kind of frustrating since it won't be included in the judging. It would have been nice for the deadlines to have some correlation with how long it took Intel to validate the apps.
One round of rejection before getting an app approved in an app store seems like a pretty reasonable thing to happen -- so the deadlines maybe could have taken that into account.
Overall, I thought the contest should have been called "Getting a Comodo Code Signing Certificate"...that was the part that was the most difficult and time consuming.
I will confirm as others have stated that the time frame of the contest basically meant that if you didn't already have an app pretty far along in progress at the start of the contest, then it was probably a stretch to write a significant app _AND_ jump through the Comodo certificate and Intel validation hoops.
Anyway, it was fun and got me to work on ForestPad.
Thanks for all the work you did managing the contest.
Timothy Lee Russell
Snoffleware Studios LLC
http://snoffleware.com
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I would like to echo some of the comments already posted. The window of time for the contest was very tight. I know that i personally put my life on hold to try to get this done on time. I pretty much just focused on getting my app done and worked on average 19 hours a day straight through (with sundays off to actualy see my family). I was kind of expecting Intel to put more emphasis on the validation process. I did end up submitting on the 21st but never heard anything until 8:41 PM CST on the 28th that it was rejected. I had a personal committment on thursday the 29th that prevented me from being able to address their concerns and i managed to wrap it up and resubmit on the 30th with no real hope that they would get to it on time but merely because of the principle of the matter. Here it is the 4th and i still have not heard anything, the dashboard just says validation in progress since 11/30/2012 at 7:42 PM PST.
additionally, i agree that building a new app rather than repackaging an existing app is fair. Resuing pieces of code from other projects is fine, but the nature of the app should be new not just a 'port' of an existing app.
I do appreciate the UltraBook and it motivated me to pursue a different type of customer so for that i am very grateful.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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First, i would like to tell them a big thank you for the UB and many thanks indeed to Meghana Rao for help in turning round the certification issues.
One of the biggest feddback i can give to Intel is to organize some code camps or events using Technical Evangalists like what Microsoft and other companies does. Since the Intel store and other technologies from Intel are fairly new, it will take time for people and companies to adopt them. Technology Evangelists would definitely help Intel in it's attempts to build a critical mass of support for Intel Store in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects.
The How to (or) step by step process guide was missing in the initial stage of submission. So i founf developers wasting time on searching for step by step guide to achieve the tasks. A complete guide (step by step) from obtaining the certificate to submitting the app to the Intel AppUp would have been helpful to lot of people. Now, you have to go to multiple links to achieve specific steps involved in the process.
Follow the popular Microsoft Technologies blog at http://www.kishore1021.wordpress.com/
See Windows store http://bit.ly/WinStoreApp and http://bit.ly/FlagsApp.
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First of All
Thanks to CodeProject and Intel After working nonstop for weeks facing lot of hurdles, roadblocks, creating Awesome fresh apps from scratch for this challenge and porting an existing app in such a tight window was a huge do or die situation, either we have to nail it or we miss it if the app rejects and not there in passing validation before Dec 1st we are knock down.
Passing the Validation is the toughest things we seen as we all would have seen nightmare and unknown bugs till we hit the last ball.
I still remember on Nov 1st we just worked continuously Note it down CONTINUOUSLY for 36 hours without sleeping and finally submitted, even we had backpain for the next two days. Yet we know hardwork will reward for sure and its not just an easy or hard task for all of the developers but a very hard task but that's the challenge and thank god we were able to hit it before December 1.
Wish Intel and Code Project would take all the positives and continue, and improve the other things which co-developers has mentioned especially Code Signing, Having Tech Evangalists, Approval process time frame and request to verify the meta-data then the binary as we see some of the folks had binary passed and failed in a meta data.
Finally as we all developers know, all has put heart and soul for this and its not an easy task every app has its own blood and sweat along with the code and design.
With Love
Suresh
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Hey Chris,
I'm not sure if the Ultrabook shipping issues were because of problems at Intel's end, or something to do with the shipping company, but I'd like to let them know that I was unable to participate in this competition because I still haven't received my Ultrabook and my app relies heavily on the sensors within the Ultrabook. I've tried contacting some person at Intel about it and got no response at all...
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Competitions always bring out the best in me.
It spurred me to get my first few articles on CodeProject including a game dev tutorial. So that is sort of an accomplishment in itself.
Thanks, Intel for an ultra fast dev machine and the dev tools. Just wish I could have a slightly extended free trial period to get to grips with the IDE and get some serious projects going on it.
The black belt program was something I was unaware of, so that's a great take away from this compo.
I just have one major gripe. Could QA turnaround times be improved to be on par with other app stores I've submitted to, because I had an inexorably long two and a half week wait to get through.
Keep the competitions coming, Intel and CodeProject. I can't wait for the next one.
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I've got a lot of feedback on the contest... all of it criticisms. And please understand Chris, I'm not leveling this at you because I think what you have done and what CP has done has been amazing. And I do believe that these types of efforts strengthen CP and the developer community in general.
But, I'm utterly disappointed that I poured every waking minute into my app to fit into the limited timeframe between when I got the Ultrabook and the Nov 21st submission deadline (even taking 3 days off from my regular job to work on my app) only to have it fail the first pass (after 8 days) and despite resubmitting it within a few hours, it has still not been published so I have zero chance of getting judged. (Despite passing the validation tests two days ago) That is a slap in the face when I did everything in my power to get the app submitted in time (the second submission was on the 29th) but because Intel got overwhelmed, I'm screwed out of being judged. That is infuriating and sours the whole experience for me.
The other thing that really bothered me was that I realized I made a small mistake the day after the original submission which might get me failed. (it did but it wasn't the only reason) Catching it the day after submission gave me plenty of time to get it fixed before they would ever get around to looking at it... but Intel locks your submission until the validation process is complete. That is stupid when everyone knows they aren't going to get to it for days. If they had marked it as 'submitted' and let me update the binary before they ever got to it, we could have saved their time, my time, and my shot at the contest. Even if there wasn't a contest at stake, how many validation failures could be avoided if they would let submitters update their binary in the time between the submission and when Intel actually gets around to looking at it? If allowing that would improve first-pass validation approvals then it seems like a no-brainer.
Further, the test group needs to read their own language and decide what it means. In my case, my app supports an adapter that provides additional information to the program. The adapter is optional and the app runs just fine without it. When you submit an app, it asks if there is any required hardware to run the application and notes that you must send it to Intel for testing. To me, "required" means that the app won't run without the hardware. Clearly not the case for me... my app ran fine without the additional hardware. But my submission was failed because my program asks about what type of adapter you are using (with "none" as the default) and apparently, in Intel's eyes, a "none" selection still means the hardware is required. So they need to figure out if "required hardware" means something that is required and the application won't run without it or if optional really means required and they are going to take on the task of testing and debugging whether the application functions properly only when the optional hardware is present.
Finally, as I noted in my article, this is the second coding challenge I've been in where people have submitted applications that have been previously published but which they make small modifications to so they fit the contest criteria. This feels to me like sniping the prizes because these apps have vastly more hours in development and testing "out of band" compared to what someone like me, with a blank project to start the contest with, has available to put into the app. So once again, I find myself unable to compete because my 6 week app looks like an Isle of Misfit Toys submission compared to the highly polished, been-developed-for-years applications that others submit. I put all this time into my app but I walk away embarrassed because I can't possibly compete with the other teams. And if there are more than 7 of these type of ringer apps that gets judged, then all the rest of us (who I feel are in the spirit of the competition) are screwed and just wasted our time.
Some will say I shouldn't complain because I got an Ultrabook out of the deal but I'm sorry... I didn't enter the contest to walk away with just an Ultrabook, I entered the contest to win it. And it really pisses me off when it becomes clear on the backside that the deck was stacked against me from the start. These types of contests should be divided into previously published and greenfield categories or should explicitly exclude one type or the other. At least they should set the expectations up front... tell me that my brand new app will possibly be going up against polished, previously published app so I know what the playing field is. Without that, it clearly isn't fair to one group or the other.
I thought the contest itself was a brilliant idea but people submitting already published apps, a piss-poor certificate process, and a slow, inaccurate, and seemingly arbitrary validation process, all combined to make it impossible for me to win. If I had known this up front, at least I could have lowered my expectations. But I really thought I had a good idea and my app would get judged on those merits. Now I see that was completely wrong and I feel stupid for ever believing it. At least if I got judged and told my app sucked I would know I lost fair and square... but not even having a shot because of problems in the process is a really hard pill to swallow.
I'm glad the contest was put out there and I did get an Ultrabook, which I really like. But the fact that, despite my best efforts and hitting the deadlines and everything else, circumstances outside of my control will keep me from even getting judged. THAT leaves a bad taste in my mouth and it will be a long time before I consider participating in something like this again.
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