Jesse Liberty: 52 Weeks of Xamarin – Week 17

Old joke.  Guy goes to a 24 hour restaurant.  It is closed.  ”

Hey,” he says, “I thought you were open 24 hours.”

“Not in a row”

So my 52 weeks took a short Chanukah vacation.  But we’re back.

I’m launching a new sub-set of the 52 weeks: we’re going to build an application from conception to placement in the store (I hope).  I’ll be documenting as I go, so there is a real chance that this project will crash and burn.

First question: what application?  Here are two I’m thinking about…. with luck you’ll help me decide:

Who Was That?

Elevator pitch: Helps you remember the name of people you meet at conferences

Use case #1: You meet someone at a conference and want to remember them. You take a picture, enter their name and then pick from choices about their hair color, height, etc. (including where you met them)

Use Case #2: You want to remember who someone is. You put in a number of criteria (hair color, height, etc.) and it comes back with photos.  When you find the person  you want, hey! presto! there’s their name.

Use Case #3 – You want to remember who someone is.  You scan through photos until you find the right person

I envision that there will be a MVC6 backend to manage the repository and to provide a browser front end for managing your set of people, etc.   I think the phone app is perfect for Xamarin.Forms; perhaps with some customized controls.

Evaluate (Redux)

This is a program designed to help you compare different model of whatever you are buying.  Here’s how it works…

• You enter a new type of thing  you want to buy (e.g., refrigerator)
• You enter criteria you care about (e.g., energy efficiency, freezer on bottom, etc.)
• You enter how important each criterion is to you (scale of 1-5)
• Now go shopping and as you look at each contender, rate it on the criteria you picked
• Get a running “score” for each item

This app also lets you take pictures of the different items, and to mark where you saw them (Sears, Aisle 5, near the wall)

You can store your criteria and you can store your scores so that you can go from store to store making comparisons.

This, too, would make a good Xamarin.Forms application

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Which do you like?