Mobile Productivity Blog

App from Scratch V - Utilizing Pyxis Mobile 7.0

With the release of Pyxis Mobile 7.0 came an opportunity to engage the developers at Pyxis Mobile in App from Scratch V! Everyone here at the office loves the App from Scratch contests. It not only fosters teamwork, but encourages our developers to think outside the box.

Essentially, the rules of the game are 1. No coding (you have to use AppStudio to build your app) and 2. You have 48 hours to complete the application. To read more about it, check out the press release.

Yesterday, seven teams presented their hard work to us (we had live tweeting during the event, check out the hashtag #AFS2010). There was a wide variety of applications created, each team brought something different to the table.

Grand Prize: Pyxis Athletic Association (PAA) - Boston Marathon Tracker

This application was designed to track runners during the Boston Marathon while integrating social media clients. Developed for both the BlackBerry and the iPhone, the Boston Marathon Tracker allows the user to see the leader board, split by Men, Women, and Wheelchair. There is also a key section that makes this application even more useful: the Friends tracker. Within this section where friends who are running the race have been added, the user can click on them, find out where they are currently via GPS, their pace, and an estimated finishing time.

The social media aspect of this application is the fluid integration of Foursquare, Twitter, and TwitPic. From within the application, users can Tweet about the race and also follow the corresponding hashtag, take a picture and send it to TwitPic which then puts it in the “Race Images” feed, and also use their Foursquare account to find stores and restaurants around your current race location. Features from Pyxis Mobile 7.0 used for this application were: composite screens, regions, cover flow, background color, gradients, borders, content authentication, asynchronous images, and iPhone 7.0 features were start-up on any screen, device ID authentication, and image buttons.

    

First Runner Up: Team 44 - 43things.com (Mobile Extension)

This application was designed to mobilize a website that claims to be the “World’s largest goal setting community” which asks the question: What do you want to do with your life? Our developers saw that their mobile site was not very user friendly and took that opportunity to create this application with not only Facebook but Twitter integration on the BlackBerry.

Within this application, users can find people and goals. They can use the Zeitgiest feature which shows which goals are trending and popular and how many users have that goal. After having logged in, it will take one click to add one of these as your goal, while also publishing your new goal to Facebook and Twitter.

Features from Pyxis Mobile 7.0 used for this application were: cover flow, asynchronous images, regions, and content authentication.

 

 

Second Runner Up: Unicorn Factory - goodguide.com (Mobile Extension)

This application was designed to mobilize a website that provides health and safety information and ratings for products. This application is great while shopping to determine whether the choices the use has made are safe, healthy, or green. Features of this iPhone and BlackBerry ready application are browsing, searching, and finding related items. Once the item is found, the user can see the environmental, social and health ratings and nutritional information if applicable. Another informative resource available is the RSS feed for the Good Guide blog.

Features from Pyxis Mobile 7.0 used for this application are: cover flow, asynchronous images, composite screens, gradients, and buttons.

Those were the winners, now, time for the other applications!

Know When to Hold Em - Audiucate

This application was developed for use on the iPad and BlackBerry by children. It is a learning tool which can be customized with the user’s voice to be familiar to the child. Creates a flash card game which the user can assess and add more questions to focus on the child’s educational needs. Includes built in voice prompts and encouragement (hand clapping).

Rick Rollers - Music Genome Project

This application pulls data from last.fm and music-map.com to categorize music by artists and related artists. It was developed to run on an Android device and includes cover flow and click to purchase (at amazon.com).

 

PSG Leftovers - Connect4 - Victorious Secret

This application fulfills the needs and does away with the frustration of wanting a cross-platform multi-player game by running on iPhone and BlackBerry. It is the classic game of Connect 4. Features live, fast updating, regions, auto polling, composite screens and buttons.

Needs Coffee - The Mallbilizer

This application can be used to find malls near any zip code, which stores are at those malls, what promotions or events occurring and when, and allows the user to purchase or re-charge a Simon Mall Vise gift card. All data is pulled from simon.com. The application has been skinned and utilizes cover flow.

 

There you have it! Pyxis Mobile's App from Scratch V winners and participants. You think this is good, wait til you see what they can do in more than 48 hours!

Pyxis Mobile Developers at BlackBerry Developer Conference

Three of Pyxis Mobile's development team traveled to San Francisco last week to attend the 2nd annual BlackBerry Developer Conference.

The keynote was given by Jim Balsillie, Tyler Lessard, David Yach, Allen Brenner, and Mike Kirkup of Research in Motion. All of the speakers presented themes of deep integration, BlackBerry Flow, a focus on consumer products and gaming with the introduction of Open GL ES, and the excitement of new Services platforms.

We learned about the Ad services APIs, in application Payment services, as well as advancements in Locations services and geolocation. On the tooling side, keynote speakers also showed off the new JDE plugin for Eclipse 1.1 and gave us a sneak peek at the GUI Builder Design Studio for drag and drop UI creation. A partnership with Adobe was also announced, allowing for integration of exciting tools and technologies with the BlackBerry platform.

You can see and hear these details for yourself in the keynote webcast!

Over the next 3 days, we tirelessly attended session after session. Some of the highlights for us were sessions covering User Interface design techniques and optimizations. It was great for RIM to provide developers with the tools they need to make slick looking UI in older device operating systems. There was also a lot of hype around Widgets, which are RIM's answer to rich, embedded web-based applications. Widgets use web technologies (like HTML, CSS, and Javascript) but are standalone applications that are deployed and managed and can fully interact with the device and other applications.

Many sessions presented at DevCon focused on the use of exciting OS 5.0 features, like SQLite, Open GL, and new UI elements. OS 5.0 UI is getting some much needed uplifts with new components like spin boxes and date, location and file pickers, as well as menu look and feel overrides and screen transitions. 

  

Overall, there was a great mix of RIM employees and community sessions presented at DevCon, including three sessions from Pyxis Mobile! Members of our development team spoke about Embedding a Scripting Language into a Mobile Application, Application Deployment Issues, and Automated Testing.

The final day of the conference was dubbed Developer Day. Activities included round table discussions with RIM employees, soapbox talks, and programming challenges. It is clear that RIM is doing a lot to foster BlackBerry developer community. Last year we participated in the round table discussions and at this year's conference we were able to see many of our complaints and feedback addressed in sessions as well as in the product road map.

See you at next year's BlackBerry Developer Conference!