Maemo.org Coding Competition 2012

Introduction
Welcome to the maemo.org Coding Competition 2012 wiki page! Beginning Monday 11th June, and running for 3 months, new applications for Maemo and MeeGo Harmattan devices (and significant updates to existing ones) will be eligible to enter in this years competition. Whether you are an experienced developer or a beginner on your very first application, we have a category that suits you and your application!

Nokia has generously donated 14 N950s and 11 N9s that we will assign to the winners and runner ups across the various categories. There will also be a community bounty made up of individual donations which will also be shared out amongst the best placed entries.

Entry is free. If there are any questions we have a discussion thread for the competition at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=83761

If you are new to the Maemo community, please feel free to check out our introduction page to learn more about us.

Thanks for your interest in taking part, we can't wait to see what you'll develop for us! :)

(NB: The final details are still being ironed out, so the below is subject to change. Keep watching this space!)

Categories
The 5 main categories are for new application submissions:


 * Desktop, System & Utilities
 * Games, Graphics & Multimedia
 * Network & Communications
 * Location & Navigation
 * Other

There is also a category for updated code and functionality on already released applications (inc porting applications from other platforms):


 * Updates and development on existing apps

And finally, there is an extra category specifically for those new to Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan development:


 * Beginners (made up of entries from the above 5 main categories)

Therefore, in total there are 7 categories in the coding competition.

Competition Timeline
The competition is currently scheduled to run for 3 months, starting on Monday 11 June 2012 and ending on Monday 10th September 2012. Competition entries must be submitted by 12 midnight on Sunday 9th September (UTC time).

How to Submit an Application
(NB: If you are not yet ready to submit your application, in the meantime please register your participation http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_coding_competition_2012#Participants)

To enter, you can submit your application entry via one of two ways - the competition submission page available at or by emailing directly to the email address maemo.competition2012@gmail.com. You will also align your entry to one of the judging categories at that time. in addition, you will also need to provide some details for the judging thread, including 2 screenshots, a brief description of your application, and an outline of what work you personally completed on it.

Eligible authors who mark their entry as 'beginner' will also have their application automatically entered into the beginner category.

Only applications received via the submission page or emailed directly to the competition email address will be counted as valid entries in the competition. New participants are welcome to join at any time up until the closing date.

Prizes
Nokia have generously donated 14 Nokia N950 handsets and 11 Nokia N9 handsets and these will be shipped free to the winners and runners up in each category, in accordance with the Nokia community device program. The devices assigned for each category is outlined below - the winner of each category will have first choice, followed by the second placed runner up, and so on until all devices have been assigned.
 * Desktop, System & Utilities (2 N950, 2 N9)
 * Games, Graphics & Multimedia (2 N950, 2 N9)
 * Network & Communications (2 N950, 2 N9)
 * Location & Navigation (2 N950, 2 N9)
 * Other (2 N950, 2 N9)


 * Updates and development on existing apps (2 N950, 1 N9)


 * Beginners (made up of entries from the 5 main categories) (2 N950)

In addition, there will be share of the community prize fund made up of donations from community members. The split for the community donation collection is still to be confirmed at this time (this section will be updated later).

Donations for the Community Prize Fund
The following list shows all of the donations and pledges made to the community prize fund so far. There is no fixed amount - all donations are very welcome - and will be accepted from now until the closing date of the competition.

To donate via PayPal, just click on the following link and specify the amount you want to donate. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FTU62WATF94BW

Please don't forget to include your maemo.org username in the PayPal message to be mentioned in the following list. If no maemo.org username is included, the donation will be marked as anonymous. You can find more information on the donation paypal process (with screenshots) on this post

Our special thanks to the following people for their generous contributions:

Participants
To help us track entries, please fill in the following table with your application details and progress. If you are unsure how to edit the wiki then please leave a message on the discussion thread and someone will be happy to do it for you :) The details you enter here are not binding and can be updated at any time until the closing date. If you are unsure about a column simply leave as 'TBD' (shorthand for 'To Be Determined') or blank if you prefer. New participants can add their details to the table below any time up until the closing date.

Rules
To ensure that the event runs properly, there are a few essential rules:


 * Only individuals may participate. Companies are excluded from the competition because of equity reasons.


 * If you have coded your app in a team and you win one of the prizes, your team has to designate one person as the winner.


 * Any number of apps can be submitted and elected as winners but, as communally agreed, there will be one prize per developer.


 * Apps must be available as executable and your entry should include at least two screen shots and a brief description to take part in the election. The applications have to run on default hardware running on an official version of Maemo or Harmattan.


 * All applications, which are created and uploaded during the duration of the competition and do not violate any laws or copyright will take part in the election.


 * A new application, in the context of the competition, is one which has not been previously developed for the Maemo or MeeGo Harmattan platform.


 * Ported applications are welcome, however only the work of porting will be considered (unless the original program is from the same developer and was developed or extended within the competition timeframe). These entries should include a description of work done during the porting process to enable the application to run on the Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan platform.


 * Already released software must have a substantial upgrade from previous releases to qualify for entry to the 'Updates to existing applications' category. These entries should also include a list of changes the author has made to the previous version.


 * Coding competition entries marked as beginner will also automatically be entered into the beginners contest if they meet the following criteria: entries to the beginners competition should be the authors first released coding project(s) for the Maemo and MeeGo Harmattan platforms, and must have been first released between the competition start and end dates.


 * Entries that are not stand alone software will have to include any libraries or files required to run, or they should be easily available via the normal Maemo.org and Nokia repositories. Clear instructions will have to be provided. In the case of interpreters and emulators copyrighted files should not be included.


 * There will be a feature freeze on entries during the voting stage of the competition. Please limit your code changes to bug fix only for any competition entry release during this period, and this restriction should remain until the end of the vote.


 * Only users of maemo.org who are registered at the time of voting and have at least 10 karma are entitled to vote.


 * Device prizes are distributed by Nokia, in accordance with any rules and restrictions of the Nokia device program. Receipt of devices from previous distribution programs could affect the competition winner(s) options of available device. If a suitable device cannot be arranged through the device program, we will make efforts to substitute a share of the community prize fund.


 * There is no legal right to win.

Voting
The voting frontend, the webinterface via which you enter your vote, is the same as for the Maemo Council elections. So you can establish an order among the participating applications indicating your preferences. Thereby, the first choice has the most impact. With following choices the impact gets less and less. The last choice has the least impact.

Counting Votes
After the voting period has finished the votes are counted. The ranking order of participants is determined based on all valid votes.

The tool used for counting the votes is OpenSTV. We use OpenSTV version 1.6.1-1 which can be publicly downloaded from http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/openstv. The openstv executable used is extracted from the *.deb package.

For each category, the ranking of candiates is determined individually.

As general "vote counting system" Fractional Transfer Single Transferable Vote (FTSTV) is used. FTSTV, however, does not provide a way for determining the order of participants out of the box.

For determining the ranking among the participating applications the following approach is used:
 * The winner is determined by running OpenSTV for one seat.
 * Subsequently, the second place is determined by running OpenSTV for two seats. Thereby, the winner from step 1 plus another participant will be elected. The newly added/elected participant is placed second.
 * For determining the third place, OpenSTV is run for three seats. The newly added/elected participant takes the third place.
 * This process is repeated until the number of seats reaches n-1 with n being the number of participants. The remaining participant not being added or elected yet takes the last place.

For automating this counting process the following script is used election=$1

tail -n 1 $election | sed 's/"//g'

>/tmp/result for i in $(seq $(expr $(head -c 2 $election) - 1)) do openstv-run-election -r CsvReport -s $i FTSTV $election \ | awk -F, '/Elected/ { print $1 }' \ | while read w       do if ! grep -q "$w" /tmp/result then echo $w >> /tmp/result break fi       done done awk 'BEGIN { i = 1; } { print i, $0; i++; }' /tmp/result | sed 's/"//g' This script should be saved to a file named "results" and can be called as follows: for i in *.blt; do sh results $i; done Assuming the script + openstv-run-election are in the same directory as the result files (the *.blt files) for all categories and the current directory is this directory, this way of calling the script will perform the counting for all categories. The only thing that may be changed in the above script is the passage "openstv-run-election" for adding a proper path to the actual location of the OpenSTV executable, e.g., to point to "/usr/bin/openstv-run-election". Aside from this exception the script must not be changed at all.

However it is still possible to also do the vote counting manually using the described process. Vote counting process, OpenSTV version used, and counting script are all publicly available so everyone can perform the voting and verify the final official results.

Getting started with Maemo application development
The Nokia Qt SDK is the official set of tools with everything needed to design and create applications for the N900. The development wiki is a great place to start, it contains lots of code examples and development guides. The "Windows Python and Qt in 30 mins" thread is a great PyQt tutorial for beginners and will have you coding your first app in minutes, and here's a tutorial from Linuxuser.co.uk.

The 'Developer' forum on maemo.org is an excellent resource to find answers and ask questions of your own.

Q: Which Twitter Hashtag to use for this Competition?

 * A: Please use #mccXII

Q: It is obligatory to code in Qt?

 * A: No, it isn't, but it would make your life probably a lot easier because you will be able to reach more platforms. We encourage everyone to use Qt.

Q: Where to submit my application?

 * A: You can enter your application via the competition entry form available at http://kojacker.net/blog/?page_id=170#entryform or by emailing your application to maemo.competition2012@gmail.com directly.

Q: Updates allowed during the competition?
I have a new app in the repository, I am considering to apply for the contest.. If i submit it now, will that prevent me to upload further versions to the repos or Ovi/Nokia Store? (As it's a work in progress)


 * A: No. you can upload updates anytime.

Q: Who selects the category of the application?
Will the developers select the category when they join the competition or will someone sort it into the correct category before the voting begins?


 * A: They will choose the category for their app, but everyone should keep an eye on that. Before the voting process starts we'll check if every app is in a reasonable category, so that it is not possible to cheat by choosing the category with the lowest competition.

Application proposal
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Apps_Missing Desirable apps missing from Nokia platforms

If you would like to have an App but you can't code yourself, write it down here! Many devs are happy to get a new idea input. (Rom Manager was a proposal from last year).

Discussion
Please participate in the discussion at talk.maemo.org

Contact
You still have questions? Contact us!
 * http://twitter.com/meetmeego
 * http://facebook.com/meetmeego
 * info@meetmeego.org

Previous competitions

 * Maemo Coding Competiton 1
 * MeeGo Coding Competition 2011