Sam Shaw
dreamworldsol.com

Your opinion is poorly informed, and smacks of arrogance. I’m not sure what axe you have to grind with MIT “whiz kids,” but you don’t even have enough information to make a sound judgment.

I’m not tied to any of the entires. Just an honest independent observation.

I sincerely hope you actually produced something that is unanimously agreed to be “something special,” which is the only qualification to label something else as “nothing special.”

No offense taken, I actually agree very much with your sentiments. Throw on an “MIT” to the end of anything and heads start turning for no particular reason (I see this effect on reddit headlines every week).

As a practical matter, I think it’s hard for bloggers such as Doug to go out of their way to search for apps that are interesting, travel there, and interview the developers and watch demos. He probably figured that if he came to this MIT presentation where 7 teams were demoing, it would be a worthwhile use of his time since he would expect the apps to be of some baseline quality (and breadth), especially if Hal Abelson was putting his name behind it.

So in the end, yes, it’s not fair :(. I just think it’s a more efficient use of his time to go to these group presentations, where he’ll have more material to blog about. Anyways, the really good apps will be recognized by the ADC Top 50, which will receive far much more pub than this blog post.

Anyway the point I am trying to make is that I think a lot of these people that worked pretty hard on their projects are getting zero coverage post-ADC I. When I read this article I just felt a bit frustrated that there are some pretty wonderful apps submitted and are being left in the dark, while these projects from MIT are being talked about. Of course everyone has their own idea of what makes a great application, but I didn’t think these applications from MIT were anything special compared to some of the other submissions I’ve seen.

I regret writing my original post in a disrespectful way, I didn’t mean anything by it personally.

Thanks

I agree somewhat, except that students took this class along with a normal courseload @ MIT. They didn’t have 80 hours/week to spend on these apps. It was more like 10-15 hours/week for about 10 weeks.

Compare that with some of the other entries, which are simply astounding! Take enkin for example (http://www.enkin.net). These guys are serious–you might even conclude that they’re doing this part of their PhD research. If they’re working on that 60-80 hours a week for say 8 months, there’s no way the MIT class can compete. The quality and sophistication of their product blows away everything in this blog by an order of magnitude.

I think the point of the demo was to give a glimpse at what someone might see on Android in the future, in addition to showing off the capabilities of the platform.

On the point of “whiz kids”, I can say out of the class of 25 or so, there were two really outstanding hackers (both PhD students in CS). One did this ridiculous drag and drop thing for Locale, and other wrote a webserver in Java from scratch (maybe PhD students have more time on their hands, I don’t know). The rest of the kids are what you’d pretty much find at any other engineering school.