Hacking in progress

Couple of quick updates:

• The theme has been announced: Serendipity
• Turnout is going pretty well: 98 participants and 31 teams at last count.

We'll do our best to keep you updated; to stay in the loop, make sure to follow twitter.com/pennapps and facebook.com/pennapps.

4:20 to Kickoff

Hope you're ready to hack.

Email pennappsmobile@gmail.com or call (484) 712-0353 if you have any last minute issues. We'll be manning these throughout the competition.

Ready.Set.Mobilize(!)

Friday, Jan 14th Schedule

The videos were so big we're having difficulty uploading them. Sry!

Still looking for a team?

Its not too late: pennapps.com/team

Coming from afar?

Find directions, local dining, and hotels

Tech-Talk Materials

Old Tech-Talks:

Final Sponsors!

We would like to thank Sencha, Arkitech, Comcast Interactive Media, Sticker Mule, Indy Hall, and Red Bull for sponsoring PennApps Mobile. Along with the sponsors mentioned in our earlier post, these amazing companies are giving students (hackers) an unparalleled chance to put their programming skills to work and create awesome applications.

Again, you can find a list of all our sponsors here.

Android, iPhone, WP7 Tech Talks!

Learn how to make mobile apps!

Wednesday, January 12th | RSVP

Thursday, January 13th | RSVP

Meet the judges!

The judges panel has been finalized! We're excited to have nine (Edit: now ten!) excellent judges to determine our prize winners this time around. Also, in case you haven't seen the rules yet, check them out. Note that the judges will assess teams based on the factors of functionality, usability, appearance, novelty, and appropriateness.

As a reminder: along with prizes to the three top teams, we have some sponsored prizes:

• Student Choice Award, sponsored by First Round Capital: $1,000
• Best Android App, sponsored by Google: up to four unlocked Android phones (depending on team size) and a tour of Google NYC, including an opportunity to demo the winning app to Google employees
• Best Windows Phone 7 App, sponsored by Microsoft: up to two Windows Phone 7 phones (depending on team size)

The Student Choice Award will be given to the application that receives the most votes. Because we have competitors from a variety of schools, the criterion to vote for the choice award will simply be having a .edu email address.

Only five more days until PennApps Mobile!

Interview w/ Beats Creator from PennApps 2010

Interview by Justin Meltzer from the Interactive Media Group.

I took some time to interview Philip Peng, a junior studying Computer Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. As the lead developer of a mobile game called Beats developed on the Android platform, he and his team transformed a concept hastily developed at the PennApps hackathon into an official Android app today with more than 100k downloads.

How did you find out about PennApps and what motivated you to get involved?

I received an email advertising PennApps, and I viewed the competition as a perfect opportunity to take a break from the daily routine of classes and studies. The prospect of playing around with code in a compressed amount of time to build a real product excited me.

What is Beats? How did you conceive of the idea?

Beats is a mobile clone of the popular game Dance Dance Revolution.  Instead of your feet, you use your fingers. I had played an existing DDR clone available on the Android market and was entirely unsatisfied with the game. The PennApps' theme consisted of products intended to improve student life; we thought the best way for a stressed out student to seek relaxation would be through a mobile game. It's fun, easy to play, and you can bring it everywhere. It's the ideal game to play between classes.

How did you divide up responsibilities among team members?

Our team was comprised of three members: Matthew Croop, a junior CS major, Yui Suveepattanaont, a sophomore studying Digital Media Design at Penn, and myself. Matt and I took programming roles while Yui designed the graphics. I worked on the timing engine and synchronization between the user and the game, Matt took care of the appearance of the arrow graphics and their falling motion, and Yui worked with Adobe Illustrator to make things look sleek and designed the icon.

What did you do after the PennApps hackaton to make Beats what it is today?

Since we had only 48 hours, the game was largely incomplete. It was buggy and if players took actions that weren't within our test cases, the game would crash. We wanted to fix these bugs, add some new features, and complete what we started. After a considerable amount of hard work, Beats was finally releasable to the general public. I registered on Google's marketplace as an official developer with a website at beatsportable.com. I never imagined Beats to take off like it did. Downloads grew from a few hundred, to a few thousand, to 113,239 downloads and an average of 4.5 stars with 909 ratings. As I saw the numbers going up, I realized that Beats wasn't just for hardcore gamers - we had tapped into the casual gaming audience. We plan on releasing the next version around the time of PennApps Mobile. It'll be a big update and we're very excited.

Did you have experience with Android development prior to PennApps?

Nope, no experience. I had recently purchased an Android phone but had not plunged into any documentation until the competition. My team and I learned as we went along.

Any good tutorial suggestions for someone interested in getting started with Android development?

Google's website has a plethora of tutorials. They may initially seem complicated, but if you keep at it you'll be able to learn the majority of tools that you need. They also have an excellent support group.  StackOverflow is another great resource if you have specific development-related questions. Lastly, check out this IRC channel: #android-dev. It has a bunch of official google employees willing to answer any of your questions. They were very helpful during the PennApps hackathon.

How many hours do you think your team spent coding? How many red bulls did you drink?

Out of the 48 hours, roughly 20-25 hours. I avoided red bull, but drank 15 cans of root beer and 10 bottles of green tea. You need caffeine to keep you going.

Is there anything that you wish you guys had done differently during PennApps? Any advice you would give to someone participating in a hackathon?

A majority of our frustration resulted from learning Android development for the first time. I wish we had familiarized ourselves with the language prior to the competition. This would have cut out the time spent figuring out how to set up the environment and begin coding. My advice would be to begin early familiarizing yourself with what to do and how to test your work, so when it comes time to cranking out the code you wont have to sweat the small technicalities.

Any advice for continuing development of a product after a hackathon and acquiring users?

Be mindful and aware of your target audience. Listen to feedback from your users and act on it. We first focused on functionality because we imagined Beats to be popular only among a select group of technical gamers. However, when we received requests from casual gamers to make it easier to upload new songs and to improve the graphics, we shifted our focus. With this new update we are giving the users what they want.

Will you be back for PennApps Mobile?

Yes. I'll be giving a tech talk on Android development this week. It's an enormous hassle and barrier for developers to get started, so I'm looking forward to demystifying this process.

Looking for a Team or Ideas?

Looking for an idea or more team members? Look no further:

Leave your info here to if you're looking to form a team:

pennapps.com/team

Have an an interesting idea? Add it to our repository of ideas:

pennapps.com/ideas

War of the Smartphones

A few months back, we surveyed a random sampling of Penn undergrads (n=492) about their mobile phone of choice. Here's what we found.

The iPhone is in first, obviously, as students base purchases off of reports like this. However, if we had asked undergrads, they'd probably cite apps as the main reason. Sure.

Blackberry comes in second by a margin of about 15%, with Android barely behind. We predict Blackberry share to become increasingly cannibalized by iPhone and Android this year despite the addictiveness of BBM.

If you're participating in PennApps this year, looks like if you want to reach critical mass on campus, you're going to need to learn from the iPhone master himself, Jordan Kay.

What do you think? Do people judge you based on your phone? Are engineers the only ones with Androids? Do Whartonites all have Blackberries? Does keeping your cell phone in your pocket increase risk of testicular cancer? Let's hear it.