After almost three months, Apptivate - the application development contest collaboration between Stack Overflow and Microsoft - has come to an end. Let's get to the big news right off the bat. Congratulations to our two Apptivate.MS Grand Prize Winners: Piano Time and Layout!
Congratulations to Piano Time and Layout! Layout is a powerful tool for interaction design that makes prototyping in the early stages of development and design a breeze. Piano Time is a multitouch piano keyboard for your Surface or other Windows 8 tablet device. (It also supports using your keyboard as, well, a keyboard.) It includes recording and playback, a metronome, a learning mode, and more. As grand prize winners, these two apps win a $5,000 cash prize! They will also be featured in MSDN Flash and on the DevRadio show, and they will be promoted by Microsoft throughout the developer community. The grand prize winners came from a pool of 15 finalists and were chosen by a panel made up of Stack Overflow's own Joel Spolsky and David Fullerton, as well as Microsoft developer evangelists Doris Chen and Jeff Brand. There was some stiff competition for the judges to choose from, and we congratulate all of our finalists. They won't be going home empty-handed, either - along with the winners of the Reviewer Sweepstakes, they'll go home with some great prizes, too. The first place winners from each category group win a Surface plus a $500 cash prize. The second and third place winners go home with good stuff, too. Johnny, tell 'em what they've won!
And you get a Surface! And you get a Surface! EVERYONE gets a Surface! The 15 finalists came from a pool of 50 semi-finalists, which in turn came from the list of over 300 fully eligible submissions to Apptivate. Some more stats about the event:
- There were 456 apps submitted overall, including deleted and ineligible apps
- The third week of November was the best week for app submission, with 49 apps coming in that week
- Apptivate users posted 2646 questions and answers in the [windows-8] and [microsoft-metro] Stack Overflow tags
- Over the course of the event, 3163 users voted (on apps or on comment threads) 7454 times
That's all for Apptivate… in 2012! The response to this was so positive, we're already on the lookout for similar collaborations in the new year... So stay tuned!