What if you could leave all of your information in one place and apply various applications to the data instead of being in the “export/import business” of moving information from one application to the next?
That was the challenge Research Associate Professor William Jones presented to his group of 16 Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) students spring term. As an incentive, Jones organized a group of faculty and industry experts (pictured left) to evaluate the applications built by the students and provide prizes to the winners.
The class split into five teams and were asked to build end-user applications in HTML5 that use itemMirror objects with drivers that target information contained within Dropbox. Applications built by the teams each work with the same folder hierarchies as shared through Dropbox but provide different functionality, such as note-taking, check-list management, outlining and mind-mapping.
By working with itemMirror objects – one, for example, per Dropbox folder – student applications could focus on the “front end” and the user experience, while JavaScript drivers accessed through the itemMirror objects worked directly with Dropbox to ensure that applications also worked well with each other.
As additional drivers are written, the expectation is that applications will be able to access information across a range of popular storing applications such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive or even Facebook and Flickr. The goal is to allow the users of these applications the ability to use their information in new and useful ways no matter how widely dispersed.
Working closely with Jones on the actual coding of the drivers were Cody Stebbins, a junior in the Informatics program, and Lizhang Sun, a graduating student of the MSIM program.
The five teams presented their projects to a panel of judges that included:
- Sheng Bi, Software Development Engineer at Amazon and MSIM graduate
- Bob Boiko, iSchool faculty
- Radek Dabrowski, principal of Trov.com, a San Francisco Bay-area start-up.
- Vijay Mital, senior architect at Microsoft
- Ken Myer, venture capitalist
The applications developed by the student teams include:
- Noot, an application that used tags to categorize information
- Planz5, a way to organize information by project
- StormNote, a simple note-taking application
- Mind-mapper, a way to visualize and link information
- NoteU, an application that created an effective use of check-lists
The judges awarded first place to the NoteU team and second place to Noot.