“Wiki MONSTER” available on Marketplace

This blog post is a short account of how Wiki MONSTER was created in less than 24 hours. The app passed the certification process and is available in the WP7 Marketplace.

On December 21st Microsoft Slovenia organized a 24hr Windows Phone 7 Hackaton. Mostly young developer from all over Slovenia were invited to Brežice where we were given 24hr to complete a WP7 app. Some came with ideas, some came with partially coded apps. I came with my laptop and no clue what I was doing there.

At 7PM the competition started and I was staring at an empty piece of paper. Knowing, that most competitions that were tightly timed didn’t go well for me, I was ready to give up. At 7:15 I somehow manged to order my toughs. I decided that it would be really cool if I managed to plan, code and upload an app in less than 24 hours. The idea for Wiki MONSTER was born shortly after. It is a small tool that tries to invoke a persons natural curiosity. It uses the live tile functionality of WP7 to show a picture and name of an Wikipedia article on the home screen. When you use your phone you are in a way forced to catch glimpses of the tile and sometimes the content catches your attention. If it does you can read the article summary and see images associated with it. When you want to know more, it is possible to open the article in the browser. In the app you just have to shake the phone and a new article will be shown.

That is the functionality I was able to throw together in the limited time. The app is on my phone for almost two weeks now and I must say that there are times I can’t stop shaking the phone for new articles. Sometimes they are dumb, sometimes boring, but a lot of time it is stuff that I had no clue about.

Unfortunately the current version needs 8 direction changes before it recognizes a shake and the next article appears. This is proving itself to be too much. A revised version is already in the certification process. This is now resloved.

For this kind of app I think it is more than appropriate to open source its code. It is poorly structured and uncommented as you expect from code written in a coding marathon:D The repo is on GitHub: https://github.com/TomyMMX/Wiki-MONSTER

I think it is still useful for someone that is learning to code WP7 apps. Any changes people will desire (read: code themselves) will most likely find its way to the marketplace app.

Now I just have to wait what the jurors of the competition say. They have some Nokia Lumia 800 phones to give away for the best and most successful apps.

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