We’re pleased to announce the results of our fourth programming contest.
We had three categories: Business, Fun and Education. All registered NSB/AppStudio users were welcome to participate in the contest. Prizes were $100 USD in each category.
Judging was by NSB’s experts. All judging was arbitrary and final. We looked for quality, performance, ease of use, sophistication and overall coolness. Apps could be anything: Enterprise, business, commercial, education, games or even something whimsical.
All programs had to be created using NSB/AppStudio. Entries could be commercial, shareware or freeware, and for iPhone, iPad, Android or multiple platforms. Code could be written in JavaScript or Basic, HTML5 and css.
Without further ado, here are our winners: (full results are here)
Category: Business
Winner: Market Raptor by Jack Hardy and Helen Sandoz
Market Raptor is an investment analysis web app that allows users to compare and keep track of the performance of their investments. It allows users to keep track of several accounts simultaneously. It provides historical and up-to-date values of stocks on the American Stock, Nasdaq and New York Exchange. Market Raptor stores the data in the user’s browser cache once downloaded, allowing users to use the analysis tools offline.
Judge’s Comments:
The app is easy to use, and serves its purpose well. However, a number of companies already offer very similar software. Using Chrome, the components in the page overlap, even though the window was maximized. It’s currently a beta, so expect further improvement.
Acceptance Speech:: I have been developing applications since the late 1970’s – starting with Basic on a 16k Sinclair, then dBase on the Osborne, and later dBase on the PC. NSBasic provided the perfect environment to move to mobile devices, beginning with the Palm. My first app for the Palm was freeware and in the first week had over 35,000 downloads.
AppStudio allowed me to again develop for the desktop when my brother-in-law requested a custom application to easily track and compare all of his investments, no matter where they were held. Jack had the original concept and I did the programming. Together we designed and produced a simple, intuitive program.
Thank you George and the rest of the AppStudio team for your not-so-simple but still very intuitive development application.
This software is: Commercial
Link
Category: Fun
Winner: Blackjack Vérité by Norman Wattenberger
Blackjack Vérité is a practice app for the games Blackjack and Spanish 21. It covers basic strategy and card counting. The game is modeled after Casino Verite Blackjack. The app is supported on tablets and smartphones.
Judge’s Comments: A number of my friends have been kicked out of casinos for card counting. This app will help you join their numbers. It’s very nicely put together: decent graphics and sound effects enhance the solid game play. The options screens are intuitive and easy to use, but not as slickly designed as they could be.
This software is: Commercial
Android iOS
Category: Education
Winner: BHS School Calendar by Paul Cohen
This webapp allows schools to easily create the school calendar. The user can specify the start and end dates of the school year. Then, the user can mark off the exam days, the no-school days, and whether the first day of school is a Day 1 (Panther) or a Day 2 (Pride). The user can then click on auto-fill which automatically marks the rest of the school days as either Day 1 or Day 2. There is a list of important dates which the user is able to modify. The user is able to save, load or print the calendar he created.
Judge’s Comments: I see how this app can very useful for schools, as it can be tedious to create school schedules using the usually available software.
However, further development is needed for this app to suit more schools. For example, the user should be able to select whether the school has a 2-day, 3-day, 4-day or 5-day system, and should be able to rename the days to suit the school. The user should also be able to add/delete important dates.
Acceptance Speech: I would like to thank the crew behind Appstudio for making it so easy to turn ideas into running apps. The flexibility of Apptudio however does makes it too easy for me to keep adding features while pushing the completion date back. I would like to thank my wife, Jane, for patiently putting up with my hours behind the screen, my kids, James, Jason and Joel, for being my alpha and beta testers, and Kristine Miller for her great graphics.
This software is: Freeware
Link