Announcing the Diversify app for Øredev 2012

Last spring when attending a Lean Coffee get-together in Malmö, I briefly spoke to Jakob Klamra (who is a member of the Øredev program committee) and asked him whether there were any thoughts on exposing the conference program data through some sort of API. He didn’t have any such information at the time. A few weeks ago, Øredev announced a competition where developers were invited to create mobile apps based on the conference data, now available in an XML file. I have no idea if those two events were related, but I like to think they are Smile

Either way, I found this to be a nice challenge, and pitched the idea to my colleagues, and soon a team was formed that happily started hacking away (hosting the code in a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and also using Trello to have some sort of control of who was what, and what needed to be done). The team consisted of Mattias Larsson, Micael Carlstedt, Niclas Carlstedt, Markus Wallén, Sebastian Johansson and myself.

The app is supposed to function as a companion before and during the conference. The main functionality is that it offers you to easily navigate and explore in the conference program, and build your own personalized conference program by “favoriting” sessions. It also features a twitter feed, listening to stuff related to the conference and the app. One focus of the design has been to allow you to explore. From almost every view, there is a way to move on and get information about related stuff. One example is when you are looking at a session, from this view you can in one touch navigate to

a page highlighting the room in which the session is on a map
a page showing all sessions in that room during the conference
a page showing details about the speaker (OK, this typically requires two interactions; scroll to the bottom of the page and then tap the speaker)
a page showing details about each other session running in other rooms at the same time

This may be the most extreme example, but it’s not unique in its concept.

One other thing that the app does is that it invites to sharing information about the conference. You can (again with very few interactions) share info about a session or speaker to social networks.

There is an update submitted to the market place which will add a couple of features (tell the app what days you will attend and it will filter the data throughout the app accordingly and, as a personal touch, the app authors’ suggestions for some sessions we find extra interesting). If you happen to have an unlocked developer phone, you can grab the XAP file for that update here. Otherwise, go ahead and get the app from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Below you find a gallery with screenshots.

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