Last month we celebrated Developer Appreciation Month, and with that we started the "Build a WinSource App" contest. We were very pleased with the turnout, and choosing a winner was not an easy task! We want to thank each and every developer who took the time to submit an app to us. Without further ado, we are very happy to announce our winner!
1st Place: Christian Prescott ($4,000)
Christian is a software engineer and computer science student at Clemson University. He works in bioinformatics and, recently, Windows Phone game and app development.
On the contest:
"A news reader like this one is an exciting project - you are handed the raw content and left to style it as you please. It's an opportunity to create a completely new user experience around an existing ethos, and what better platform to do it on than Windows Phone. I spent about two weeks of my spare time creating the bulk of the app thanks to the ease with which you can lay out pages and designs, and then another week polishing the experience and trimming fat. It's incredibly satisfying to complete a project that feels clean and intelligent every time you open it."
Features of the official WinSource app:
We chose Christian's app for a variety of reasons, but what stood out the most was the full feature set. Some of our favorite features include being able to view comments, the live tile shows how many new articles have been posted, individual articles can be pinned to the Start screen, and videos can be viewed in the app. We also really liked the native design of the app. When you're using the WinSource app it will feel very natural, almost as if you're in the WinSource "Hub" rather than a separate app.
Here's a list of some of the many features found in the WinSource app:
Feeds for most recent news or specific, filtered categories
Live tile with alerts for new stories
Stories and comments are displayed in ultra-smooth native Silverlight format without resorting to a slow, resource-intensive browser window
View embedded YouTube videos and WinSource's YouTube channel without ever leaving the app
Share stories via email, SMS, or your social networks
Pin deeplinked stories to Start to follow discussions
Search with endless scrolling results
Offline viewing of recent stories
Particular effort has been made to gracefully handle network errors and unexpected responses
Functions as a true hub for Windows news
The app is already chock full of features, and we'll be working with Christian to make the app even better in the future. The app should be in the Marketplace soon, but we'll be sure to let you know when it arrives. In the meantime be sure to check out more screenshots below, and meet our second and third place winners.
2nd Place: Feifei Huang & Jonathan Loon ($750)
Feifei Huang is a Sydney based developer with 9 years of experience in Java and C#.NET. He is currently working for BlackRock Asset Management. Jonathan Loon is also from Sydney and his work ranges from C#.NET and SQL back end systems, web front end development, and web design over the past 8 years. He works for HotelsCombined.com.
On the contest:
This project was absolutely great fun. We enjoyed working on it and are very happy with the results.
3rd Place: Sébastien Lachance ($250)
I’m a passionate software developer. I was born in Québec, Canada. I work at Mirego; a company specializing in mobile applications. I am the Windows Phone and Windows 8 specialist. My friends describe me as a Microsoft Evangelist. I love C# programming with Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, the Windows Phone and the Windows 8. When I’m not in front of a computer, my hobbies include playing bridge, poker and other card games, biking, reading technology news.
On the contest:
As a competitive person, this challenge was exciting to create a good application. I learned good tricks for building the core of an application can be run on Windows Phone and Windows 8.
Congratulations guys!