Slashdot Mirror
iPhone App Wins Microsoft-Campus Programming Contest
imamac writes "Startup Weekend was a 54-hour coding marathon held on Microsoft's campus last weekend. It was designed to encourage the use of MS programming technologies. However, the winner of the contest was an iPhone app: '"Awkward," whispered Startup Weekend organizer Clint Nelsen into the microphone upon announcing the top vote getter.'"
and not two.
iPwnt
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
is to not use Microsoft Technologies. Seems to make sense to me. Using Microsoft Technologies you get canned solutions that do things that have been done over and over before. Breaking from them allow you to make wonderful apps.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Do'h!!
This could be the end of that little experiment. Rule 1 is don't say anything good about your competitor. I wonder how much air time this will get in the media. And I can see the Apple vs. Microsoft ads now. Sucks to be a 'softie right about now.
Best regards.
What, was someone supposed to write an app for the Microsoft phone?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The parent used a poor choice of words. Startup Weekend in general isn't an MS program, only the BizSpark program that helped organize this particular event.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I haven't bothered to confirm it, but that's the claim.
Caveat Utilitor
Nice to see that there is yet another generation of committed developers out there that don't mind being shackled so long as their shackles either look nice or are very popular.
That works out to two days, using my Microsoft calculator.
Nothing in the summary or TFA. What does this app do?
There's an app for that, recursively.
They shouldn't be able to win until apple accepts the app for download.
Startup Weekend is an intense 54 hour event bringing brilliant minds (entrepreneurs, VCs, developers, designers, marketers, lawyers etc.) together to create a company (or as many as companies as the participants decide) from concept to launch! Interactivity and forging...marketspeak bullshit, blah blah ...Microsoft "experts" will be present to will provide support for developers building applications on Silverlight, Windows 7 and Azure. We will have other...blah blah.
Learn That Name, a new iPhone app designed to help people remember the names of people they bump into at events, won the most votes
I can't see that the TFS got it wrong, at least according to these quotes from the TFA.
that phone can't do.
XCode is free, only deploying to a real iPhone/iPod and selling in the app store costs money.
Why should anyone pay money to develop for WinMo? it's market share has shrunk and C++ isn't a nice to write in as Objective C.
Does anyone know if Microsoft has any plans for Windows Mobile? It's old and slow, but I actually prefer the UI to the iPhone's. If they made a decent web browser they could be back in the game! I prefer the precision of the style to the fatfingered approach of the iPhone and Pre.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
He said confirm, faggot!
Xcode is free if you've got a Mac. Otherwise it costs 1 Macintosh worth of dollars.
Doesn't the iPhone SDK cost like $100 or something?
And what, exactly, does one develop for the WinMo on? :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...it's the start of the "extend" phase of their three step plan. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
XCode is free, only deploying to a real iPhone/iPod and selling in the app store costs money.
Why should anyone pay money to develop for WinMo? it's market share has shrunk and C++ isn't a nice to write in as Objective C.
Objective C are you kidding me, what a stupid language, C# is truly the next best language.
Funny at Microsoft's expense == -1, Offtopic
No. Excellent research skills you have there.
Granted it moves every year, but this year it was also held at the Microsoft campus - and the 14 other apps were all written for Windows Mobile.
Microsoft sponsored, at the Microsoft Campus, with mostly Microsoft apps - well, is it really so inaccurate to label it a Microsoft event even though technically it is not?
It's close enough to be funny anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"You consider yourself a smart shopper?" (yes) "You want to save money?" (yes) "Would you rather have an inferior product, or what I'm selling?" (your superior product).
NOT "So having heard all this which brand do you think is best?" (I'm still loyal to Commodore Amiga/Apple IPod/SheevaPlug/virtually anything with LINUX/the list goes on...)
D'oh!
Inscribed on a 1 Mac bill: In Jobs we trust, everyone else pays cash.
No, the iPhone SDK is a free download from ADC (you have access to it from the free developer account).
The $100 is for a code signing key that allows you to put those binaries on an actual iPhone and to submit it to the app store
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
Last I heard the preferred language(s) for WinMo was .NET managed code with the .Net micro framework so that means C# and VB.net - you'd probably use C++ today if you are maintaining a legacy app, or writing high performance stuff (although even then, the main app would probably be managed code with just the performance critical bits in native code)
Pain, suffering and a lot of cash?
Just because im downloading it now, I want to mention that android sdk is freely avaliable for windows, mac and linux. Both 32 and 64bit :)
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I haven't been in the loop on WinMo in a few years, since I gave up on my Jornada and switched back to Palm, but at that time the Windows Powered SDK was a free download from Microsoft.
Visual Studio Express is also free, as are the Windows and Windows Mobile SDKs. And you can develop in .net for WinMo using the .net Compact Framework, not only C/C++.
And it doesn't cost money to deploy to a real phone or list on an app store (and you dont run the risk of having your dev costs flow down the toilet entirely because Apple rejected your app).
You can get a copy of Visual Studio Express here (it's free): http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/default.aspx
And you'll also need this WinMo 6.5 SDK (it's free also): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=20686a1d-97a8-4f80-bc6a-ae010e085a6e.
FWIW, I developed for Windows Mobile / Smartphone for several years. The tools were all free. Back then they had something called Visual Studio Embedded (free of course). The best thing was I was able to write a single version of the application (a non-trivial multi-threaded, multimedia application with network connectivity) which ran on my Windows desktop as well as on Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) and Windows Smartphone. I did the vast majority of my debugging and testing on the desktop. Very rarely did I have to do any mobile-specific debugging, other than wrestling with the &*%^$# cell network (this was from 2001 through 2005, when pushing data through the cell network was barely functional).
Oh, and by the way, deploying to phones is free also. I don't need Microsoft's permission, nor do I have to pay them a fee.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
You can develop directly on your windows mobile pda.
You can also develop for windows mobile pda under linux.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So you can build all the applications you want. But if you want to actually run them on your iPhone, it's $100.
"We're giving away this car for free! But if you actually want to start it and drive it, you'll need to pay $50,000 for the key. Oh, and if you somehow tinker with the car so that you don't need to use this key, the car's warranty is voided."
Nice dance, fanboi. But if you want to develop applications for your own personal use on the iPhone, it'll cost you $100.
"Not to get too far offtopic, but your sig is highly interesting. Has it occurred to you that Bill and Steve did exactly that?" IIRC, Apple came first. And much about Microsoft is due to its aping Apple.
That Apple still survives is an artifact of anti-competitive laws. In this case, those laws have worked famously.
Best regards.
Visual Studio Express is free as are the WinMo SDKs... but they don't work together. If you want to do WinMo development you need Visual Studio Pro, which isn't cheap. (Yes there used to be free tools, but they're deprecated now.)
Encourage use of MS tech by providing a mobile OS that doesn't suck. The last two years I had to develop for WM, and every time I thought I cannot be disappointed more I was wrong.Â
Only once you publish. They give you the SDK free, and the ability to put the software on X number of specific phones free, if you have a (free) Apple ID. To get it on the store it costs $100.
For the record, the however-many-of-us who have jailbroken can program on any platform, and in a number of languages like Python and Java (both have bindings to the iPhone's Obj-C classes), and can get our apps onto our devices for free.
You can deploy it to a certain number of iPhones, including your own, for free, but for public distribution on the app store, that' s what costs $100.
You know, two months ago I gladly payed $100 second time for my iDP program. Fanboism has nothing to do with it - these costs were recovered on the first day of my app sales.
Some people spending money on apple stuff, some people are making money on the apple stuff.
Some are just posting on Slashdot.
No you can't. Installing and debugging app on the device requires Apple signed certificate (provisioning profile) and that costs $99. But then again, any sane developer can recover this cost in a few days of sales.
> You can develop directly on your windows mobile pda.
You can remove your appendix using a toothpick sticked into your left eye...
Yes, but it comes with a free computer!
Actually, you can't.
If you want to install your app on an actual phone it has to be signed using a $99 development key.
I really don't think it's that big of a deal, but folks will get bent out of shape about anything. Hell, if I really cared, I could pay one windows box worth of dollars, then buy visual studio, then buy a Windows Mobile phone, and avoid paying $99 dollars to run my custom application on my phone.
Nice research skills there MS fan boi, your own personal one is free others cost money! You can develop for the Windows Mobile platform for free, but not with any MS supported compilers. Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.
Why bother
C# is a toy language like VB
Why bother
No, if you want to develop applications for distribution to other customers, it'll cost you $100. You can install on your own phone in various other ways.
OK, that's a change. You used to be able to get the whole toolchain free.
Are you kidding me? How many Apple computers are running MS Office. Personally I think if Microsoft put more focus on cross-platform applications they would be able to leverage their extensive experience in developing software. The have gotten so bogged down in pi##ing contests with Google, Oracle, IBM and almost every other windmill out there that they have lost sight of what made Microsoft all their money, Basic and MS Office.
I say now that RIM has released an SDK for VS we should create serious applications for everything and stop thinking that Windows will exist in the same form in twenty years.
Dateline Orlando: Man get's hurt after trying to break into jail because he fears for his life. (true story google it)
The nuts always roll south.
It doesn't surprise me. Most Microsoft developers have an internal account to O'Reilly's Safari bookshelf. When logging on, the most popular books checked out by Microsoft users are shown.
For the past two months, four of the top five books have consistently been Macintosh and iPhone.
And vim is free if you have a computer to run Linux on. Otherwise it costs 1 PC worth of dollars. What a pointless comment.
If you want to develop for the iPhone, you will use Objective C. Your only other option is a web app, but providing that offline may or may not be allowed, and either way, it's not likely to expose the same APIs.
Contrast this to Windows Mobile which, being an actually open platform (or at least as open as any other proprietary OS), will support any language people care to port to it. That goes double for Android.
Me, I prefer Ruby. "Aha," you say, "That has iPhone support!" As many owners of jailbroken phones will tell you, it's not that you can't do this on the iPhone, it's that Apple might arbitrarily reject you for doing so.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"C++ isn't a nice to write in as Objective C"
Says who? An apple developer? Personally, I prefer c++ because it's portable, besides that you'll be more likely to be using c# on a windows device.
The real reason not to like Windows Mobile is because it has no marketshare
That's an odd claim to try to make, considering they're so closely related. Have you actually used both enough to gain some level of mastery? Because I have, and the difference is, in my opinion, more a matter of preference than between any other two languages I can think of. One thing I will say, though, is I find Objective-C syntax absolutely horrendous to read compared to C++.
There is a decent browser (2 in fact,check upcoming Skyfire) for Windows Mobile, it is Opera 9
http://www.opera.com/mobile/
(as Opera Desktop 10 shipped, their site getting a bit hammered now, check later if you wish)
It is a real browser, just like iPhone Safari. As a bonus, it will have ''turbo'' (mobile compressing/reformatting proxy) too. Skyfire on the other hand, is a shell for a Desktop mozilla, which does amazing things like playing flash videos no matter whatever format they are. I also loved its approach of unified search/url bar. I hope Desktop browsers will steal it :)
As a Symbian owner, I don't think MS will drop Windows Mobile. It is their most prestigious Windows yet without any kind of evil security issue so far and MS only companies love it.
Insightful my fat arse. No, you cannot remove your appendix using a toothpick sticked into your left eye because your hand won't fit through the eye socket. But you can very well develop directly on a PDA which can be quite comfortable with a full keyboard and a large screen some of them have.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And what, exactly, does one develop for the WinMo on? :)
Depends - there are a few choices there. Linux and CeGCC, for example.
Minimum price for the ability to do it with supported compilers is whatever Visual Studio standard costs. Like $300.00 but you can get it free if you give up a weekday and attend the exact right launch party like I did.
There is a little known (I guess not anymore, now that I post it on /.) marketing twist that is presently in force with regard to Visual Studio: you can "upgrade" to VS Standard or Professional from any of the Express editions (which are of course downloadable for free), or from any "competing product" - e.g. Eclipse or NetBeans counts. This effectively means that you get to buy full license for upgrade price. For Standard, this is $200 - still not cheap, but I thought it's worth clarifying the number as it stands today.
Also, if you're going to write and sell applications - i.e. you're going to run a startup - you could apply for BizSpark (technically this is on a case-by-case basis, but I haven't heard of anyone turned away) and get VS and most other Microsoft developer offerings kinda free - the only caveat that you'll have to pay $100 when quitting the program, either in 3 years, or when you make $1M in profit - whichever one happens sooner.
There's also CeGCC, which of course isn't anywhere as nice, but still an option.
You can get Express, and you can get Mobile SDK, but your Express won't work with that SDK. Unfortunately, there's no free offering for mobile application development from Microsoft at the moment. In fact, you can't even use Visual Studio Standard - you need Professional.
Just because *you* happen to prefer Objective-C does not make it 'nicer to write in'. I will concede that the mac API's are nicer, in my opinion, but that has nothing to do with Objective-C, which is a piece of trash bolted onto C. Of course that's *my* personal opinion, but I make no far reaching claims otherwise.
Oh, and for the record, WinMo SDK *is* free. Visual Studio is not, but that is not a requirement for WinMo dev.
Define "toy language", then we can discuss whether a quarter of the software development industry is relying on a "toy" or not.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
If you look closely at the video, there were TWO versions of the app demo'd. Neither were on Windows Mobile. One was an iPhone app. The other was a Palm Pre / webOS app. Alas, the guy who demo'd the webOS version didn't have a microphone and you can't hear him talk in the video. Also, instead of using a live Palm Pre, he used the free Palm Pre emulator environment (running on a MacOS laptop), employing the Pre / webOS emulator which uses Sun's (Oracle's) VirtualBox platform. But it's not an iPhone-only app. They have a webOS version. Not a Windows Mobile version, though.
Granted we're still on VS2005 but even with Resharper it's still significantly slower and harder to work with for C# development than eclipse has been for Java development for the last 4 years.
I was there and that wasn't the goal at all.. We hold startup weekend all over the county and the last two Seattle ones were at Google and Adobe.. no one was expected to write a google app or an adobe api..
I don't actually believe that you're so dense that you don't see the point being made here.
Please stop pretending M$ and App£e are separate companies. The former owns a large chunk of the latter. And nothing makes the evil empire happier than their technology spreading wider furthering their stranglehold of the industry. One thing they're real good at is marketing, this "statement" is a perfect example.
Fuck them and their secret sauce.
Indeed, Cocoa Touch gave us a big advantage over the folks developing in the MS stack.
I have to agree with the GP here. I've been coding in C++ and legacy C for more than 10 years professionally. About a year ago jumped into objective-c. Pre-2.0 I'd maybe agree with you, but nowadays objective-C is a much better world once you get comfortable with the syntax than C++ in my opinion. Granted, a large part of it is that apple's API's are so convenient, but I really like the simplistic approach that most objective-C has over C++.
Yeah, iPhone - great and easy to program...just wait an eternity for a garage full of spotty interms to finally get around to approving it for release - that's a whole other ball game. Maybe Apple could organise an iPhone programming contest? All contestants must check in all non Apple technologies at the door, refuse to talk to anyone else, deny they've participated, accept unconditionally that the rules of the competition are not stable and maybe changed at any time without notice, not share their code or results with anyone else and let the aforementioned garage full of spotty interns make the jury and all the decisions, without review or explanation. But if you win, oh glory be.....
That Linux users feel they are entitled to everything for free?
As a matter of fact I created web-based application of that kind in order to remember my company customers' names... I call that personal service when I can call my customers by their names.
And vim is free if you have a computer to run Linux on. Otherwise it costs 1 PC worth of dollars. What a pointless comment.
Apart from the fact that vim was actually developed on/for the Amiga, not Linux, it is "cross-platform". You can get a version to run on Windows or on Mac OSX.
Generally speaking most "Linux" (read "Posix") software will compile and run on Mac OSX and even on Windows. It is Mac and Windows software that tries to be single-platform. Even then, there are projects that try to run or compile some Windows or Mac programs so that they can run on Linux.
Linux goes out of its way to be compatible with other OSs. It is Mac OSX and Windows that try to be incompatible.
I am anarch of all I survey.
4% is hardly a quarter of the industry. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
However, if you want to use VS2008, you need professional edition which is considerably more expensive than $200.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings
What i'd like to know is how the hell they search for things like C, C# and java (all of which have significant other meanings) without getting a ton of false positives.
Still if you assume thier results are valid and add together the two languages the GGP called toy languages you get about 13%. Add in java which is pretty similar to C# and you are at about 32.5% (all percentages rounded to the nearest 0.5% before adding for ease of mental arithmetic).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One thing I will say, though, is I find Objective-C syntax absolutely horrendous to read compared to C++
You are right in saying it is a matter of preference, but it doesn't sound like you've had that much experience with Objective-C. Consider writing a method for an object with multiple arguments:
C++ example: theCar yearMakeAndModel(1966, Ford, Mustang);
ObjC example: [theCar year:1965 Make:Ford andModel:Mustang];
One nice thing about Objective-C is that the arguments are coupled with the portion of the method that will be handling the arguments, so it is not as easy to mess up the order they go in, and also makes it easier to read & code IMHO.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Why do I need a Mac to write apps for the iPhone? Is there a technical reason or is Apple just forcing people to buy their hardware, as they usually do?
Define "toy language"
It can't be used to write an Operating System. You know, like Windows or Linux or Mac OS X.
Mister, you just saved me a fortune in medical bills!
However, if you want to use VS2008, you need professional edition which is considerably more expensive than $200.
You are absolutely correct, and it's a very good point. "Upgrade" price for Professional (same trick applies here) is $550.
As I am an MSDN subscriber I didn't realize the express editions did not support the mobile SDK, though according to the snippet below you can use the standard edition - pro is not required.
The snippet is also outdated, unfortunately. What it says was true with regard to VS2005, but in VS2008 mobile development tools were moved to Professional edition.
I'll accept that as an axiom. Perhaps toy is not what I intended but it does indicate the way their programmers are treated. If you treat Java, C# and VB Sort of like dildos and C, assembler etc like dicks, dildos are easier to use and are used far more often than dicks but try making a baby with a dildo. Barely possible but not really practical.
Why bother
You can't "Think Different" unless you convert adverbs into adjectives!
Layers are what build humor.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First off, it may have shrunk, but its still deployed on a massive level, its not just for phones you know.
Second, I've been doing professionally (read as: getting paid to lead development teams) for 15 years now. I use currently, C, C++, Objective C, Objective C++, Ruby, Perl, Java, sh, Apple Script, Windows Script, Atmega assembly and probably some others (I've changed some python scripts, but not in any way to call myself a user of it). Thats just things I've used in the past 2 weeks.
In that list, Objective C/Objective C++ is at the very bottom of my list of preferred development languages. I'm sure that my experience with all the other languages has some influence in the preferences, but I would take any of the others over Obj* any day. It is just freaking annoying. Perhaps if I'd never used another language it wouldn't bother me so much, but the way XCode and Objective C work are just crappy. The fact that I have to drag and draw little lines in a GUI to make connections between window components and code is ridiculous. Perhaps, somewhere, hidden beyond my grasp, there is a way for me to get around these things, but I've yet to find it, and Objective C/C++ remains an annoying pile of shit that just makes me feel dirty every single time I have to use it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to accept the money that I make on iPhone apps written in ObjC++, but at this point, I've got 3 iPhone apps that are pure ObjC++, I gave it my full attention in an attempt to get to the point where I didn't mind using it. Those 3 apps are the oldest ones I've got for the iPhone. All new development basically uses ObjC/C++ as nothing more than the shim between the NIB files and C/C++.
The point? Everytime I see someone say how ObjC/C++ is better, all I can think is that you haven't been doing development very long, if ever. I can even understand how some people like Visual Basic, ObjC/C++ not so much. If Apple was paying me to say it, I might like ObjC, they aren't so I don't.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I did it on my Dell laptop for a while before buying a Mac. Costs $130 or so (cant remember exactly what the cost was now) and even came with the required stickers so I could 'brand' the computer with Apple branding to mean the EULA requirements.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I tried developing a palm application on an older device and even with a keyboard, it wasn't all that fun. Reverted to a proper desktop shortly thereafter.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Sure. I was a Windows Mobile developer for a while. True, developing directly on the PDA is not that comfortable, but it is a perfectly valid temporary solution. It is better to have this possibility for emergency causes than not to have this possibility at all.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap