Announcing the winners of the January 2013 Dev Derby!

This past January, creative web developers from around the world showed us what they could do with drag and drop interaction in the January Dev Derby contest. After looking through the entries, our three new expert judges–Craig Cook, Franck Lecollinet, and Guillaume Lecollinet–decided on four winners and two runners-up.

Dev Derby

Not a contestant? There are other reasons to be excited. Most importantly, all of these demos are completely open-source, making them wonderful lessons in the exciting things you can do with drag and drop today.

The Results

Winners

Runners-up

These contestants were not satisfied just bringing this age-old interaction to the Web. They also made it fun, helpful, musical, and even a little amusing. Congratulations to them and to all of the amazing contestants who pushed the limit of drag and drop interaction.

Want to get a head start on an upcoming Derby? We are now accepting demos related to mobile web development in general (March), Web Workers (April), and by popular demand, getUserMedia (May). Head over to the Dev Derby to get started.


6 comments

  1. Rogger Shaw

    Congrats to all the winners. Cheers up!

    March 4th, 2013 at 03:15

  2. Jonathan Vitela

    Hi,

    I just found that the second place demo by Jesús Pérez is not using the HTML 5 drag and drop API, which I thought was the hole point of the contest, instead it relies on a library called gridster which uses normal mouse events to implement the drag & drop functionality.

    I don’t know if Jesús was aware of this, I don’t believe he tried to cheat because he makes very clear on his demo that he is using the gridster library.

    However I believe it is the duty of the judges to verify that at least the winners meet the contest requirements, I feel this kind of behavior from the judges is offensive to other contestants who actually took the time to implement the native HTML5 API instead of just grabbing any available library such as jquery-ui.

    What is the point of having a so called “Demo Studio” if some of the demos are not implementing the featured technologies? This is also misleading for newcomers.

    March 4th, 2013 at 03:32

    1. Robert Nyman [Editor]

      Thanks for the feedback. I haven’t been involved in this process, but I will talk to the Dev Derby team about this.

      March 4th, 2013 at 03:48

    2. John Karahalis

      Thank you for bringing this up, Jonathan.

      The judges did bring this to my attention. After reviewing the contest requirements, I realized that they did technically permit the use of JavaScript libraries like gridster. The short version of the contest description did refer to the Drag and Drop API in passing, but the longer and more official version mentioned only drag and drop interaction. I agree that Jesús was not cheating. In fact, I believe his entry is valid given the circumstances.

      That said, I agree that this is not fair to you and other contestants who correctly assumed that we were looking Drag and Drop API demos. I have marked Block Puzzle as tied for second and have moved the rest of the results up accordingly.

      Thank you again for pointing this out. I will be more careful in my wording moving forward.

      March 4th, 2013 at 09:29

  3. Jesús Pérez

    Hi all.

    Sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn’t try to cheat or something like that, I created okifu for fun before to know about this Derby and I signed up for the contest because it was about drag and drop.

    You can retire okifu of the contest, and give the prices for the other participants, there is not problem at all. In next contest I’ll try to play more with the rules and create an amazing demo that beats all others :D

    Un saludo

    March 4th, 2013 at 16:32

    1. Robert Nyman [Editor]

      From what I know, you did just fine and submitted it. The instructions seem to have been unclear, and I believe John’s solution, described above, makes sense.

      Thanks for your contribution!

      March 5th, 2013 at 06:44

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