Competition Details

Our programming competition is designed to see just how much people learned at the conference, while at the same time letting people show off their creativity and technical skills. Therefore, we will have three options for an application and we will judge applications based on few different categories. The finalist and runner-up will be those who excel in all those areas. You may work by yourself or in groups, but realize that the prize must be shared.

Judging Categories

• Function: Does the submission do what we described?
• Creativity: What unusual or interesting elements does the submission use to present/manipulate the data?
• Technical achievement: Was there anything extraordinary the developer(s) of the submission did technically?
• Best adherence to the HIG: Does this submission look like an iPhone application?
• Most creative use of iPhone technologies: How may different iPhone specific technologies were used? Were they used tastefully?

Option 1—Boggle

Create the game of Boggle. For each game have a random borad. Select strings of characters to generate a word. Verify that a user-selected word is indeed a valid word. When the timer runs out, the game is over.

Option 2—Course Catalog

By adding ".xml" to any UIUC course catalog page (e.g., http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2009/spring/schedule/CSS/index.xml), you can get XML data instead of HTML data. Use the course catalog data to create a Course Catalog application that allows you to browse classes and see when they occur. Also, you could figure out for any given room what class is currently in session.

Option 3—Recipe Book

Create a recipe book application. Add a recipe with ingredients, baking instructions, and a picture. To get the picture, you could use the phone's camera. Or how about dynamically scaling the ingredients based on how many you are serving?