Ultimate Coder Ultimate Challenge – Developer Tips from the 2012 Competitors.

It was towards the end of last year that we signed-off with the first ever Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge where four teams had 6 weeks to code an application that would highlight the unique features of Ultrabooks. Based around the use of sensors we learnt a lot of useful coding tips, user interface do’s and don’ts and saw six teams producing a varied range of applications. I have recently been in contact with some of the teams to get an update on what they learnt and to get coding and marketing tips for other developers thinking of working with Ultrabooks.

Coming soon! Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge II

Lee Bamber [link] of the Game Creators has this tip for developers

“The Ultimate Coder competition taught me this; create apps for the user, not the device. You can go to town supporting every feature a device has to offer, but leaving out the actual user is the biggest omission you can make. A great app is a relevant app!”

Clef Software [link] created BioIQ wanted to provide some tips for competitors in the next round of the Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge.

• “Seize the opportunity – you can’t go wrong by going for it.  Irrespective of official outcome, one comes out a winner!
• Understanding ourselves and our objective – it makes feature trade-off and product development manageable, while throwing up such question by a combination of new things to learn and limited time and resources.
• Be Disciplined – UCUC runs at a very regular cadence that demands discipline, and you better be disciplined.”

Andreas Breitschopp [link] has some important words about his HTML5 work

“The UCUC was a very interesting challenge where I learnt for my project that porting a HTML5 app to Windows 8 modern UI style is not that easy. To be honest I even would not call it “porting”, you just develop it more or less from the ground up again. The challenge itself was a great experience, especially also getting feedback from the bloggers, keeping track of the progress the other challengers are making and, of course, meeting all of them in San Francisco at the end!”

Soma Games [link] will be part of the next Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge…

“After the dust settled in the 1st UCUC our Soma Games team learned one critical thing. Fail and fail often. When given a new technology developers are faced with challenges and many will take the easier “safer” route to development. Maybe behind closed doors they will work on some risky applications or dream of launching on new platforms but for the most part they develop on well-tested and path proven systems, technologies and platforms. What we found is that our community likes the fact that we are putting our necks out there and trying new things. Will every game or app be a success? No, but we come closer to finding that perfect match. With Wind Up Football our game became way better than it would have without the challenge. We pushed Unity 3D to its limits. We pushed really hard. I feel good with where we ended up too. And I believe our team is enjoying more freedom too.

This time around we are even building our own tools to integrate with Unity 3D. The plugins don’t even exist for what we want to do in the new contest.  Will it all work? I sure hope so. Will we give it our all? You sure bet we will.”

Thanks again to all the teams for their feedback. If you, the reader, have Ultrabook developer tips or links, drop them in the comments below. Don’t forget to bookmark our Ultrabook Software Development Resources page.

Don’t Forget! Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge II is coming soon and it’s going to include Perceptual Computing hardware. We’re please to be judging again.

This is a sponsored post brought to you by Intel and Ultrabooknews.  All content in this article is written by Ultrabooknews. Subject by Intel. We thank Intel for their support.