They Came, They Coded, They Conquered

Coding competitions can be a tricky affair. What merits one app to be “better” than another? Is it how innovative that apps is? How cool it looks? How useful it is?

I believe that when an app makes you say “What the #$%@…that’s sick!”, you know you have a strong contender that stands out over the rest.

This year’s FTW coding competition was bigger and better than last years’, with over 90 registrants and 20 stellar apps submitted. We  saw web applications that creatively used Open data catalogues, apps that used the PHP language and apps that made use of the Windows Azure Cloud.

While the three finalists (Pictured from left to right Dashan Yue for Taxicity, Francois Mazerolle for Tholus and Timothy Dalby for FindAHome) came and battled it out at MWNW, I’d like to take a moment to highlight some of the apps submitted for this year’s  competition:

First, the honourable mentions:

Pinyin Online

This app caught our attention immediately. It was an early entrant into the competition and showcased a really easy way to input Pinyin characters into a search engine. To test out the app, we had some Mandarin speaking colleagues test out the app and they were really impressed at how accurately it would detect the right characters. (Nik has a small poster of his name in Chinese and when we typed “Nik” into the app, the characters on the poster popped up!)

Created By Tony Yang

Mac’s CMS

Last year, Macdonald Robinson submitted his PHP Framework (Mac’s MVC Framework) for the FTW Coding Competition, and while it was very impressive, it didn’t constitute technically as a PHP app. This year, Macdonald submitted a full blown CMS for the competition called Mac’s CMS, built using his very own MVC Framework. This app contains an easy to use blogging system, chat client, and content management system. The CMS basically is a window through which you can tap into the power of the underlying MVC framework.

Creator Macdonald Robinson

Now, The Finalist Apps

3^rd Place: Project Tholus – PHP Category

Project Tholus was an app that sought to reintroduce the world to the age of tabletop RPGs and text-based video games. It uses a “Teacher” and “Student” system (like a dungeon master and player) to allow players to create their own RPG adventure and play through them as a team. The game is designed to get people reading again and focuses on vivid story telling coupled with detailed game mechanics. Francois had been working on Project Tholus for over three years and application consists of over 100,000 lines of code. Project Tholus came third place but took home the title of Best PHP app for the competition.

2^nd Place: TaxiCity – Open data Category

Taxicity is a Silverlight-based video game that blends Crazy Taxi with GTA2, except instead of liberty city, it uses the backdrop of Vancouver. The app shows a an entertaining use of Open data, the entire map is pulled from Vancouver’s open data catalogue to re-create the city of Vancouver within the game engine. It uses Bing’s API to implement cool features like bird’s eye view and streetside. Taxicity’s game engine (ManPowerEngine) is an open source project that’ freely available on Codeplex. Taxicity came second place taking home the Best student app bonus prize.

1^st Place: FindAHome – Open data Category and Cloud Category

FindAHome by Timothy Dalby took home the grand prize at MWNW. FIndAHome allows you to give a “Homescore” rating for houses in the Edmonton area, letting you know whether or not a house is in close proximity to different public services (like Schools, Buses, Recreation etc). FindAHome also allows people to list their homes, where they provide some details around their house and the homescore is calculated based off the address.

FindAHome won the Best Cloud app, Best MS SQl App and Best Open data App.

Check out below some of the other awesome apps entered

The post They Came, They Coded, They Conquered appeared first on Make Web Not War.