On August 18th we kicked off the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group. During the kick-off we had a great demonstration of Appcelerator Titanium from Kevin Whinnery. Kevin is an Appcelerator Engineer and Product Evangelist and it was clear from his presentation that he was both passionate and knowledgeable about Titanium. Almost everyone we spoke with was extremely interested in giving Titanium a try and the Hackathon was the perfect opportunity to kick the tires and build a great mobile application.
If you have been following the voting this last week, you know that we had 5 great Hackathon entries, 4 of which were built with Titanium. The voting has ended and Scott Willhite should be announcing the results shortly. Regardless of which mobile app is declared the Hackathon winner, the real winner is the entire DotNetNuke community. We have gained valuable knowledge about a great tool that can aid in extending the reach of websites and web applications that we all build. We have also added 6 more Open Source applications to the DotNetNuke forge which will provide great starting points when developing new mobile applications.
If you haven’t built a mobile application yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try. With tools like Titanium, it is not nearly as difficult as you might think. Even if you want to get closer to the metal, and regardless of whether your mobile platform of choice is iOS, Android or Windows Phone 7, mobile development is still pretty straight forward and very rewarding.
As Jason Graves says in the video below, this Hackathon was Hacktaculous! I couldn’t agree more. I look forward to our next Hackathon where we will have an opportunity to further expand our development skills.
JUST FOR FUN: There are 12 products or product logos pictured in the image at the upper right of this blog? Can you name the 12 products all? I am looking for specifics (e.g. DotNetNuke XXX Edition and not just DotNetNuke) Leave your guesses in the comments below. I have a special gift for the first person to correctly get all 12 products. If you guess and are not correct, I will only tell you that it is not correct but will not provide any further hints.