Chip Chick
Intel’s Ultimate Coder Challenge is a unique competition where 6 developers go head to head to develop the ultimate Ultrabook app. I am participating as a judge in the competition, and I have been following the progress of these developers as they worked to complete the ultimate Ultrabook app. It has been an interesting journey over the past 6 weeks, as we have followed the progress made by the developers who are competing in Intel’s Ultimate Coder Challenge. Well we have finally arrived at week 6. That means that the developers have just about finished their apps and that the judging process will start soon. So within the next week or so the other judges and I will be testing out the fruits of the developers’ labor on a reference design Intel Ultrabook running Windows 8 RTM.
This week Lee has several screenshots up of his Love Hearts app, along with a video up which shows the final app in action. He also mentions how he has been working on monetizing the app. As expected, his app looks very quirky.
George & Suresh were already showing off their completed app last week, but this week they have also announced that they are starting Ultrabooklabs.com, which “will be a developer focussed Ultrabook development knowledge base where articles will mainly be from developers to developers.” The site is already live and is a must to check out if you’re considering developing an Ultrabook App of your own. Do these guys ever sleep?
Shailesh is also showing off final screenshots from his BioIQ app which is especially being aimed at students and teachers. One of his last additions to the app has been to take advantage of the live tile feature in Windows 8. The app now uses the live tile to help remind users to pick up the game and finish the levels.
Meanwhile, in the final week, Andreas has added a Words Card Game to his vocabulary trainer app.
Finally, John has a post up talking about how his team’s Wind Up Football has also been developed for other platforms besides the Ultrabook, but he points out that from amongst all the devices they have developed the game for, the Ultrabook version is able to take advantage of the most horse-power. Therefore it has extra eye-candy and special effects that you won’t find on other weaker machines. He also concludes that although the competition is called the “Ultimate Coder”, it’s really about creating an app with the ultimate user experience. We think that he is spot on with that sentiment and that is something that we’ll certainly be keeping in mind when we finally get to test out everyone’s final app submissions.
