ACEIZE Tracking the current state of Science and Technology

In January and February of this year, I, G Kontos spent my nights and weekends being a giant dork. I spent my time programming an application for Google's Android Platform contest. Android is Google's new cell phone platform. At the moment there are several cell phone manufacturer's who are lined up to use the new platform. Unfortunately I don't know the names of any of these companies, but they are major players in the cell phone market. There should be phones shipping with Android by the end of 2008 -- October was the last actual date that I heard.

So I entered my application in this contest. My application was simple, and it handled a list of to-do items and various alerts. It works very much like the scheduler application of your current phone, but just a little bit differently. Over 1700 applications were entered into the contest and 50 winners were selected from the individual category. Sadly, I did not win the application contest. But my application did place in the top 50%. Not too bad for spending two months on a four month contest. Just imagine what I could have done if I hadn't gone Christmas shopping! Google apparently wanted to rub my loss in my face and sent me this little email:

Jefe Todo List

Effective use: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Polish: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Indispensability: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Originality: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications

Overall: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications

It's called 'Jefe Todo List' because that is the name of my software company -- JefeComputing.com. So a scheduler application was in the top half of original applications to this google contest? That's surprising. I suppose the concept of having a scheduler be able to handle items that have no associated dates is something that is unheard of in the software world. So I gave something new to the world. Yeah, Me!

Since I lost the contest, I am going to post the application on my site. Feel free to download it, if not much changes on the Android platform in the next few months it may even run on the first version phones due out in October. If you can't wait to use my brilliant and innovative software design, you can download an android emulator from google -- It's super easy to install on a Windows or Mac (probably on Linux too). I'll even send out the code, just shoot me an email. I'm not really chomping at the bit to do extra work to send my code around to the world... so yes, you will need to get in touch with me.