|
Koby Amedume
on Tue Feb 27 2007 15:05:31 GMT+0000 (BST)
Back in November 2006, we launched the Zimki Application design competition to anyone who wanted to create an application using Zimki. Our independent judges selected seven great applications that were felt to be innovative and creative while making great use of the services that Zimki has to offer.
First Prize
A trip to Etech in San Diego, CA and a MacBook Pro
Name: Paul Mison
Application: http://groupr.realm.zimki.com/
Description:
groupr is a small web application that collects photos in Flickr groups that you belong to into a series of web pages, so that you can easily see what's been added. It uses Flickr's API (with authorization) to fetch all the groups you belong to (including private groups) and shows the most recent images from the group pools.
The application has been designed with extensibility in mind and Paul hopes to continue developing it. Paul added "Thanks for the competition, which encouraged me to get to grips with some interesting technologies."
Sound bites from the Judging panel:
Simon Willison said “Groupr solves an actual, real-world problem that I haven't seen tackled before: Flickr provides a tool for seeing all of your friends' recent photos, but doesn't provide the same functionality for your groups. Groupr uses Flickr's authentication API to pull in both public and private photos, giving it an extremely easy to understand interface. The design is minimalist, clean and functional and the application degrades gracefully in the absence of JavaScript.
John Musser of programmableweb said “Like this one for: simple, but readable/functional UI, integration with an external API, a reasonable degree of complexity (at least in that it uses the Flickr authentication) and thus appears to make greater use of the power of the Zimki platform.”
Andy Budd of Clearleft said “Nice simple use of the flickr API. What more can I say?”
Second Prize of a MacBook Pro goes to:
Name: Joel Rowbottom
Application:http://rssfoo.realm.zimki.com
Description:
The application is called 'rssfoo', and it searches for text within a list of live RSS feeds. Searches happen in real time subject to the cache - that is, every time you search, it pulls the RSS feeds to match them and then represents any matches it's found in reverse date order. There's also a link to add other RSS2.0 feeds, and list the current ones it 'knows' about.
It does very basic caching up to a memory limit which I worked out through trial-and-error, then will fetch things live if that memory limit is exhausted. You can clear the cache simply by deleting the class 'rssCache' and it will re-establish upon the next search. Cache time is 60 minutes, although I've not worked out how to do garbage collection yet.
There's some validation that goes on when you add a feed - things like checking it might actually be rss2.0 and stuff. It'll try and be helpful with error messages as much as possible.
Sound bites from the Judging panel:
Simon Willison said “This is a great implementation and a nice idea, but it suffers from very poor performance which appears to be caused by the actual concept itself. Live search over a list of RSS feeds is nice in theory but cannot be practically achieved with good performance, as the prototype's slow speed aptly demonstrates. The developer has already started adding hourly caching; the logical progression is to cache the feeds in a separate (scheduled) process, sacrificing the 'live' aspect in favour of instant user satisfaction. Once speeded up, this application would be genuinely useful for mining through a list of RSS subscriptions.”
John Musser of programmableweb said “Top contender because it feels like a real application: good, clean UI including custom graphics, provides useful function, allows user contribution (Add Feed), some degree of technical sophistication (the caching), includes related pages like About, and usually worked as advertised”
Andy Budd of Clearleft said “Nice little RSS search app. The interface is simple and the results are accurate. Good use of Ajax when returning the results, although the app could be a little faster. Also it's a shame that it only currently supports RSS2.0, but that wouldn't be difficult to change.”
Joel added "The Zimki platform proved really very useful as a tool to carry out prototyping and if I'd had a bit more time I'd probably have worked out some other ways of using it - to be honest, it sprang to mind as the first prototyping tool I'd use for an upcoming project so that's cool.
It was good to be able to "play" with the platform without worrying about resource limits within the bounds of the competition - it gave a different angle on development processes, some facets of which have followed through to my own development processes. The support I received from Zimki staff was pretty good and helped me to fix a couple of issues which I wasn't otherwise able to find out about. That said, it was fairly simple to find out "how to do things" within the Spidermonkey engine and then extend that to the Zimki platform. Of especial use were the example applications which assisted me in how to sort stuff."
There are also five runner ups who each win a Mac Mini! They are :
Andy Fletcher
Application: http://service.zimki.com/user/fora/
Description: A forum built in Zimki that uses a bunch of Zimki features such as users, pagination and the Wiky markup.
Neil McGovern
Application: http://weatherboard.realm.zimki.com/
Description: 'Dashboard' style weather applet.
Candace Partridge
Application: http://londonweather.realm.zimki.com/
Description: Multiple London forecasts in the same place - because none of them are ever right!
Dominic Baggott
Application: http://poker-blinds-clock.realm.zimki.com/
Description: It's a poker blinds clock (funnily enough), to help you out in poker tournaments by displaying the current blinds and time left in the round. At the end of the round, it makes weird noises and increases the blinds.
Pete Ryland
Application http://service.zimki.com/user/be49f6ce-a5c8-11db-a30b-f15471a6159f/
Description: a very simple calendar.
The competition entries were judged by our panel of highly respected independent developers, hackers and entrepreneurs:
Brady Forrest of the Radar Team
Ryan Carson of Carson Systems
Simon Willison (freelance)
Andy Budd of Clearleft
John Musser, the founder of ProgammableWeb.com
|
