Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

Thanks everyone for the continued discussion, it's great to see so many new posts :) Sorry for not getting back quicker yesterday, it was a busy day... phew!

Absolutely agree :) We're had newbies right at the top before, so don't be put off if you feel you are inexperienced! It's not always the slickest or most functional app that wins, but a great idea will always get you very far ;)

Ok, we're in agreement ;) Sayonara multi-platform award - you'll have another time, another place :)

Right qwazix, that's the truth of it. As we've done in the previous two competitions, we'll consider all newly released apps within the competition timeframe as 'new'.

It's ongoing, keep the feedback coming :) This still seems to be the best solution if we want a smaller number of categories and device distribution.

1. Desktop, System & Utilities (2 N950, 2 N9)
2. Games, Graphics & Multimedia (2 M950, 2 N9)
3. Network & Communications (2 N950, 2 N9)
4. Location & Navigation (2 N950, 2 N9)
5. Other (2 N950, 2 N9)
6. Updates to existing apps (3 N9)
7. Beginners (made up of entries from categories 1-5) (2 N9)

However i take on board the comments from beginners like yourself and computerinfo21 that although you can compete for N950's with everyone else there isn't any assigned specifically for beginners only. We have 10 N950s, at the beginning we had the idea of 10 categories. Now we've lowered the number of categories it gets tricky how to divide these up. I've reached out to see if there is a possibility of swapping a N9 from our allocation for another N950 from the community device program. It doesn't hurt to ask, so we'll see if that can be done :)

BTW there is opposition to the above so if that's what you want, show your support for it. It'll be much more likely to happen if the community are seen to be behind the idea.

-- off topic
Also BTW if anyone is interested in this project I mentioned earlier in the thread, I'm a volunteer at a local youth centre twice a month teaching (ie. playing about with) mobile dev and electronics and we did a version of this project yesterday. You can check out our silly project on youtube or on my site :)

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

That is true but your average voter can see that a helloworld app has no functionality whereas he should not be required to check if the ported x comandline app is original work or just a matter of minutes of recompilation/repackaging. Anyway it is also true that commandline apps won't get so many votes but this enhances my point. The user pool for such apps is quite small so if I write a really powerful and feature-packed cli application I wouldn't want to compete with somebody that just "ported" rsync over.

(This is just an example, I won't be doing any powerful cli apps at least for this competition)

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

I responded in that thread.

As for additional N950 for beginners... If your words about great idea that matters are true, I'm not afraid to raise the visor and compete without any concessions for me: it is fair tournament, after all =)

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

I think you'd have good chances of swapping in the Qt5 device program. Most of the participants in there seem to prefer N9. On the other hand, I think N950 will be highly appreciated as a community gift and that perhaps wouldn't go down without much gnawing of teeth and bitterness :).

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

I agree with most of what you say on all things qwazix, but i'm not convinced on this point :) One of our first winners, Smoku, won the games competition with a Playstation Emulator port (PSX4M). if i remember right, it was command line and didn't have a GUI. But it was a very popular app, something a lot of people wanted. Sometimes it's hard to second guess what the community will vote for, if they really like something they will vote for it. And what they vote for won't always reflect the skill or hard work that goes into the different application developments, i can almost imagine if someone made an app that only showed an image of Chuck Norris somebody out there in TMO-land will vote for it :p It's all very subjective and each of us will approach voting by what we think is most important to us. It can throw up a few surprises along the way :)

In regards to port entries, we've always let them in with the caveat that we ask voters to consider what work was done to port the application. That could be creating a new GUI and/or re-writing system calls, graphics library calls, whatever. It's not always easy to see what work has been done looking from the outside in. We'd ask that entries like this are accompanied by a description, almost like a changelog, of work done/features/etc - this means that we can help communicate to the voter the effort that went into porting the application. it's not fool proof but it helps.

That's the spirit beresk_let :) It's true that good ideas have always done well in the past, so i don't see they won't in the future. But in the end the community decides what's a good idea, so hopefully your ideas are in sync with the community thinking :D

Thanks for the idea ajalkane, that's a possible avenue alright. Certainly we want to place nice with the other competitions and device programmes, we'll see what the council come back with and take it from there :)

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

qgil answered something about extra N950(s).

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

Indeed :) We'll grab that extra one and it gives us a great mix of devices, and there's a possibility for more if we need it :cool:

So how do we like this?

1. Desktop, System & Utilities (2 N950, 2 N9)
2. Games, Graphics & Multimedia (2 N950, 2 N9)
3. Network & Communications (2 N950, 2 N9)
4. Location & Navigation (2 N950, 2 N9)
5. Other (2 N950, 2 N9)
6. Updates to existing apps (3 N9)
7. Beginners (made up of entries from categories 1-5) (1 N950, 1 N9)

Not too many categegories, it's still got a little more encouragement for new apps over updates to existing apps but nobody is being favorited too much, and there's something in there for everyone :)

If we get a happy consensus we can get around to officially starting the competition soon, maybe even this weekend :) There's the bounty split to decide on and the submission site (but that won't need to be ready for a while yet, zehjotkah will make sure it's there for the finale ;) ) We'll need to tighten up the rules and get the wiki sorted, then the hard work can begin :cool:

Edit: Update - we've swapped a few N9s for N950s, so our total device quota is now 14 N950s and 11 N9s. So beginners can have those 2 N950s afterall :)

1. Desktop, System & Utilities (2 N950, 2 N9)
2. Games, Graphics & Multimedia (2 N950, 2 N9)
3. Network & Communications (2 N950, 2 N9)
4. Location & Navigation (2 N950, 2 N9)
5. Other (2 N950, 2 N9)
6. Updates to existing apps (2 N950, 1N9)
7. Beginners (made up of entries from categories 1-5) (2 N950)

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

This begins to sound really great ! I can't wait for the opening of the competition :)

By the way, does the new "new app" rule mean that I may begin right know to investigate about a new app ?

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

Hey Tofe, glad you're excited! I'm excited too to see what application you're going to bring us :)

Investigate away, nothing wrong with being prepared :) Just don't be releasing it until after the competition starts (unless you want to go into the updates category ofcourse ;) )

--
We'll have to decide on a competition duration and timeline folks, how does 3 months from 11th June (Monday) to 10th September (Monday) for entries sound? Is 3 months too long/not long enough? Voting will be a week or two later.

Re: 2012 Coding Competition
 

Sounds good to me :)