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Where are you and your team from?
Our team of three was assembled from developers within Tieto Corporation mobile devices R&D unit. We all currently live in Finland but we have an international background as well; Martti has his roots in Germany, Victor in Spain and Jani was recently working in China for a couple of years.
How many people are on your team?
We’re three developers, each focusing on different areas of the whole mobile solution: Jani Lirkki developed the Windows Phone app, Victor Arroyo developed the Qt apps for Symbian and Meego devices, and Martti Piirainen took care of our .NET backend and deployment to Windows Azure.
What do you (and/or your team/company) do when not competing in Hackathons?
We are all software engineers by profession, specializing in mobile devices and platforms. We serve our customers with application development, platform engineering, and various support services around the mobile experience. We do have lives outside work as well. Martti is a proud dad and likes to spend time with his family, but is also an experienced jazz trombonist. Jani is passionate about footbag net sports, whereas Victor is a research scientist at the University of Oulu, leading the UpWind project and spends most of his free time kitesurfing and snowkiting in Finland.
Our company, Tieto is the leading IT service company in Northern Europe providing IT and product engineering services to a wide range of industries with a workforce of 18,000 experts worldwide.
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Describe the Windows Phone application you created at the Hackathon.
For the hack-a-thon, we created "Did You Like It", a feedback service that anybody can use to get feedback about topics of their interest. It is a crowd-sourced service where anyone can create a new poll and view results of any poll on our website http://www.didyoulikeit.net. We are curious to see what our service will be used for and what kinds of polls people will create there over time.
The service works mainly on QR barcodes. After creating a poll, you'll get a QR code that you should distribute to the people whose feedback you are mainly interested in. People can read this QR code with our mobile app and they will be presented with a feedback form they can use to express their opinion and view the current poll status. On Symbian&Meego the service works also with NFC, unfortunately NFC isn't supported on Windows Phone yet.
Does your application utilize Windows Phone 7.5 features, and what are the features?
The Did You Like It Windows Phone application relies heavily on QR scanning that was made possible with Windows Phone 7.5, Silverlight 4 VideoBrush + PhotoCamera APIs. Scanning a Did You Like It QR code with Bing Vision on Windows Phone 7.5 devices takes you directly to Did You Like It Marketplace page where you can download the app. Bing Vision and Web Marketplace, as new Windows Phone 7.5 features, helped us to integrate better on the platform and provide better first time user experience to our users.
What inspired you to create this app at the Hackathon?
We thought getting and receiving feedback is important for both the ones who are asking for feedback and the ones providing it. Everyone wants to be heard and feedback is a crucial part of reaching continuous improvement. We wanted to provide a method to provide locally relevant polls and make responding as easy as possible. The local relevance comes from the fact that the QR code can be distributed to targeted audiences as part of your product or e.g. attached to a wall at certain locations. About making it easy, we did our best and are now looking for feedback from our users to improve.
We had to come up with something simple that is doable on the 40 hours of time we had at the hack-a-thon, but we fell in love with this idea since it is easily extendable and can be the seed for something bigger.
What other tools/programs do you use to help you make your app?
The Windows Phone app was developed with free tools provided along with the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK; Visual Studio, Marketplace Test Kit, Expression Blend. The app itself relies on free libraries ZXing, Silverlight Toolkit, Coding4Fun Toolkit and JSON.NET. The web service part is based on Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure, developed using Visual Studio Web Developer Express. Did You Like It Qt app for Symbian and MeeGo devices was implemented with standard Qt development tools, QtCreator being the core development tool. It also uses ZXing library for handling QR codes.
If you had two more hours during the competition, what would you have done (with regards to your app)?
For the Windows Phone app, we weren't happy with how the poll results chart looks. With the extra time we would have wanted to make it more beautiful. In two extra hours, we would also have submitted the app to Windows Phone Marketplace. For the Qt app, the time would have been spent on working with starting the application automatically after reading a Did You Like It NFC tag. This would have ensured an even better user experience. The lack of time also limited us from integrating our polling to social networking and other services. Wouldn't it be nice to automatically discover polls targeted to you and follow the results at your favourite social networking service?
Can you share what you’re working on next for Windows Phone?
Our employer Tieto is constantly working on significant amounts of Windows Phone solutions tailored for our customers and for our company’s internal needs. Jani spends most of his development time with those challenging assignments but the next app to be developed on free time is going to be a mobile version of a game invented by a friend. Such free time projects provide the freedom to experiment with platform features our enterprise customers don't typically ask for, thus providing new challenges. Follow @lirkki at Twitter to know which Windows Phone project is going to be public next.
Download Did You Like It today by heading over to the Windows Phone Marketplace!
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