WOWZAPP 2012 is the Worldwide Hackathon for Windows. The Spiffy team hosted 120 developers and designers from the 9 – 11 Nov in a 24 hour race to create Windows 8 apps. Pitch Night (9 Nov) Participants were given 60 seconds each to pitch their Windows 8 app ideas and form groups. This significantly improved the quality of the apps as only the best ideas were selected to be further developed upon. Our youngest attendees, Ragul, 12 years old and his brother, 10 pitched their Windows 8 game, Miners. 
The secret sauce to every app is important – what makes your app stand out from the rest on the Windows Store? 
Hack Time (10- 11 Nov) Participants had 24 hours to come up with their Windows 8 applications. This includes a myriad of games, productivity apps, travel and branded apps. 
Tianyang and fellow ame developers from Tyler Projects hacked 3 games in 24 hours. 
Participants making themselves comfortable on Level 21. Lightning Talks Lightning talks are short, concise 20 mins talks by speakers to summarize a topic. We had 4 Lightning talks covering Windows 8 Design, Window Phone 8, Game Development for Windows 8 and creating apps using Parse and Mashape. 
Gary from Nokia, talked about the new Windows Phone 8 and the opportunities for developers. Surviving WOWZAPP We kept participants awake by screening horror movies and feeding them with popcorn and candy floss! 
Our booth serving popcorn and candyfloss. 
WOWZAPP attendees took a break from the hackathon by watching horror movies at midnight. Demo and Judging Time 25 teams demo-ed their Windows 8 applications, a mix of productivity, games and corporate apps. 
Keith, who works as a developer at Philips Singapore – demoed his Windows 8 app Seamless Sound, a middleware app that helps you to sync all your playlists to your music devices. 
The team from NYP demoed their educational game for children to improve spelling abilities – WOW Words. 
The judging of the apps were based on 50% audience voting and 50% by our technical evangelists, Yizhe, Chun Siong our AMM, Alex.
The Winners
Party Blitz – Tianyang and Stanley from Tyler Projects created Party Blitz, which includes 5 mini games in 1 app for you to play with your friends at any party! 
Decide for me – an app by Republic Poly students to help you decide when and what to when you can’t make up your mind. 
Vampire (JiangShi) – A game that features 8bit graphics by game developer, Ian Tan. Kill the Chinese vampires and save the town! [caption id=“attachment_12704” align=“alignnone” width=“610” caption=“Continuously engage with other developers through Spiffy.sg and Windows 8 SG Dev Community Page.”]
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- Download the Windows 8 Developer Tools– they’re all free
- Windows Developer Centre– all news, updates, links and downloads
- Building Windows 8– an inside look from the Windows engineering team
- http://channel9.msdn.com/– video tutorials and product information from Microsoft
- Windows 8 SG Development Community / Dream Build Launch Facebook Group – need help? Try here.
Thank you everyone for joining #WOWZAPP! We hope you had a great time and watch out for more awesome hackathons and hackweekends here at Spiffy!