Our first event of the new year will be a workshop to help students get started with Mosync and participate in their 2010 Code Challenge. Aaron from MobileSorcery (the company behind Mosync) has kindly agreed to come over and conduct the workshop for our members.

This event is the first in a series of workshops we will be organizing this semester to spot the developers among students and to promote application development for both mobile and the web.

Mosync is a open-source framework that can be used to build cross-platform mobile applications in C++.

Register and drop by.

This was an exciting find for me, personally while working on the web chat for Hotline. NUS has its own web-authorization mechanism, called webauth very similar to the OpenID. While I am unsure of other applications that are currently using this service, I do know that Microsoft Dreamspark makes use of it. Try downloading a software from there and you’ll be redirected to this page to verify that you are indeed an NUS student.

I think it is safe to say that we couldn’t find the documentation to use this service very easily on the NUS site. In fact, we couldn’t find it at all. So, we had to google a bit and finally managed to get this excellent guide from the Georgia Tech site that employs a similar service.

The implications of this discovery are immense from the point of view of a developer. Now, we can have applications exclusively for NUS students like the Hotline Chat. Any online competition can now have a university-level ranking system. You are fourth on iTrivia among your Facebook friends but where do you stand among your peers on campus. Imagine the Module Review site employing this to verify student login. (Keeps the NTU students and spammers away)

We are calling this NUS Connect, after Facebook Connect and are currently looking at creating a generic wrapper that makes this button (and hence, the service) embeddable on any website.

You might remember completing a NUSSU Hotline survey in IVLE a couple of months back. The student club which serves as a listening ear to all NUS students, was recently toying with the idea of moving online. As anything connection to Computing even a remote one excites us, we offered to help them out and the end product is the beta version of the NUSSU Hotline Web Chat.

I think it is a brilliant move taken by the current Hotline Executive Committee. It is a challenging project and a bold experiment but we are having a lot of fun building it. If you are interested in contributing to this project, ping us at contribute@nusacm.org.

They are planning to release this to all students quite soon. Who knows? This could potentially evolve to edge out the phone-based service Hotline offers as of now.

After a quiet first semester, where we just had a few projects going on at the backend, we realized it is time we took our ideas from the drawing board to the field.

The focus of the club this semester will be on application development. While everyone loves programming, students are still hesitant to take that extra step and enter the creative world of building applications. We are concerned about this and have therefore, decided to direct our events towards this end – To give programmers the taste of building applications – web and otherwise.

The plan is to create a developer community on campus. In the process, we hope to build a platform for developers to meet and exchange ideas and also host and share their applications. Ambitious? Let’s see.