Diffraction Studios: How much is possible in a weekend?

Microsoft and Nokia recently put out a challenge to Australian developers: produce apps for the Windows Phone marketplace and score a free Nokia Lumia. 3 apps would get you a Lumia 710 and 4 apps would get you a Lumia 800. This challenge is still running and details can be found here.

Now let’s be honest, I don’t know why anyone would go for the 710. It looks like a great phone but if you’re already developing 3 apps, developing a 4th for the awesome Lumia 800 is not much of a stretch.

With only 50 phones available this competition was all about quantity not quality. I quickly dumped all of my original ambitious ideas in favour of anything I could build, test and submit in half a day. In fact all of my apps could have been done in less but I couldn’t bring myself to publish something that looks like sample code stolen from the web.

Below is the end result. The challenge was great fun and I’m pretty proud of what I was able produce inside of a weekend. It's a testament to the great developer tools and submission process available for Windows Phone that you can go from design to submission in around 6 hours. The only sour experience I had was when Fast Dice failed certification first time around (a rookie mistake with the White Theme!) but the resubmission took 6 days to be retested!

So please check out my submissions for the competition. They’re all free and don’t contain ads. I actually find Score Keeper and Fast Dice to be really useful and I reckon they’re as good as any other similar app out there.

Score Keeper

(marketplace link)