Author: André Meyer (page 2 of 2)

Mobile World Congress 2013

As TouchMountain won the Lumia Geek-7 Week Award, we were invited by Nokia to demo our app at the Mobile World Congress 2013! The MWC is the biggest technology congress worldwide with more than 17’000 visitors. We had a couple of very interesting appointments throughout the week: demo & awarding of TouchMountain at the Nokia Application Developer Conference, a meeting with the awesome guys from PainHawk, an interview with Nokias film crew, a VIP dinner at the Blanc Brasserie at Mandarin Oriental and an elevator-pitch-style presentation at the WIPJam DemoCamp. We met a lot of great people and got tons of great feedback and suggestions.

You can find more here:

TouchMountain won the Lumia Geek 8-Week Technology Showcase Award

TouchMountain won the Lumia Geek 8-Week Technology Showcase price! There were 400 entries for this competition and TouchMountain convinced by using several technologies and integrating them in an easy-to-use and intuitive UI. Moreover, the novel take on augmented reality was honored. We are extremely glad and proud of this award. TouchMountain will be shown at a WIP Jam session at MWC in Barcelona. Thanks to all users and fans for your feedback & support!

You find more information about the competition here. And a blog post on Nokia Developer and WIPConnector.

Happy Coder – Personal Analytics

Abstract

Recent advances in small inexpensive sensors, cheaper storage, and low-power processing cause an increasing popularity of trackers that quantify a user’s activities throughout his everyday life. The Fitbit and the Nike+ Fuelband are two examples of commercial approaches that motivate a user to be more active by tracking his activity and visualizing the analyzed data. In the area of software engineering there are similar tools to support a developer in a single domain of his work, such as planning tools or bug repositories. Only little research has been performed on how to integrate the available data and how to focus on providing a retrospection of a developer’s work day.In order to contribute to overcome this shortcoming we introduce a tool, Happy Coder that provides developers with a retrospective analysis of their work day, by tracking predefined metrics and visualizing them on a web client. This includes a front-end with consolidated data analysis, visualizations and representations of the collected data. Two studies revealed that developers assess their productivity based on a personal evaluation of their work day. This assessment is dominated by personal preferences of different metrics like work items, meetings, web searches or activities on the computer. In this talk, we present related work, interesting findings of our studies and Happy Coder.

The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.

 

Author’s comment

I’m happy to tell you, that I just finished my bachelor thesis. It was an extremely intresting experience and I learnt a lot. I want to thank everyone for their help. I now got the chance to further work on this project at the S.E.A.L. group 🙂
You may find more information here.

 

Download

You may download the paper here. Thank you!

TouchMountain won the Swisscom App of the Year 2012 Award!

Oh wow. What an evening! At the moment, we are on our way home from the Swisscom App of the year 2012 award from the Swisscom Brain Gym in Bern. The Jury rated all nominated apps according to the innovative capacity, customer value and user friendliness.

And it was worth the travel. We are extremely excited to tell you that TouchMountain (the app sponsored by MIT-GROUP) won the award in the category Windows Phone. We will now be featured in the Swisscom news magazine with more than 1.5 million readers! We also want to thank you for your interest, your comments, ratings & feedback. We really appreciate that.

By the way: stay tuned for future updates (including Windows Phone 8), we have great things to show you…

 

You find more about the award here.

chapps4 touchmountain_appoftheyear

Promote your App with a QR-Code

An easy and cool way to really make the user download your app for one of the four big App Stores (Windows Phone Marketplace, Apple App Store, Google Play, Blackberry App World) is a QR-Code. – The user just doesn’t have to type a long url…

Every smartphone has an app to read QR-Codes, the Windows Phone OS has even built it in. It would be kind of inefficient to provide four QR-codes on your display. Luckily, there is a solution for that from appspot (http://qrappdownload.appspot.com).

It generates one QR-Code for all major platforms and redirects you to the right App Store if you read the QR code. If the phone could not be detected or the platform is not supported, there is a message with following-up links.

That is great 😉

Here you see an example of our brand new App for the Restaurant LUEGETEN (for the readers of you without a QR-Code reader, I provided a weblink instead):

luegeten_qr-code

Challenges and Solutions in Distributed Software Development

Abstract

The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.
The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.

 

Author’s comment

I’m proud to tell you, that I just finished my really first paper. I wrote it in a course called “Advanced Software Engineering” at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich. If you have further questions or remarks, feel free to contact me.

 

Download

You may download the paper here. Thank you!