Ideas, concepts, enthusiasm, implementation, team work, and fun – these are some of the ingredients for great, productive work. Great ideas are vital for success, but to make your ideas work you need an experienced team and an enthusiastic atmosphere.

There are situations when you have a range of ideas but lack time. The fastest way out here is to jump onto a hackathon.

If you’ve never heard of a hackathon, this is a 24-48 hour event during which a team of developers needs to create a working prototype for a product, typically a mobile or web app. It’s a hacking-marathon; a hackathon. Get it?

Intellectsoft and its most enthusiastic team got together for a hackathon last weekend. We decided to call our hack marathon “Code for fun”. The starting point was to define the ideas that would form the basis for our hackathon.

There was a varied abundance of ideas but we decided to stick to the most fun ones and at the same time, creative and useful ones.

Our first project is devoted to entertainment and game fun. There were many memories of good times, when so many of us were having so much fun playing the all famous bombing game. And it came as a lightning strike that we can develop a network bombing game, enrich it with the desired features, play it whenever we want and provide access to the game to a wide range of users.

After over 18 hours of coding, we developed an initial version of the game. To start playing the newly developed game, you need to recruit several players and enable a Bluetooth or WiFi network.

Four players meet in the battlefield, plotting strategic moves to bomb their opponents, getting bonuses and trying to stay alive on the game field for as long as possible. And you know what – the game really rocks!

The second idea we have strives to implement a classic T9 keyboard for iPhone. Actually, the idea originated very simply: the current keyboard is not very convenient and fast to use, tapping the right button at one shot can be a real challenge.

That served as a main prerequisite for our decision to create a keyboard for iPhone that would be more useful and effective. So we composed an extensive dictionary and integrated a T9 algorithm to the new keyboard.

Moreover, we made a backspace button bigger for our own pleasure and for the enhanced convenience of the users. We have tested our keyboard solution and have got quite convincing proof that it really makes iPhone messaging quicker and more effective. We bet that you can set new typing achievements with the friendly keyboard developed by our team!

All in all, it was an immense pleasure doing something fun and practical together. All the hackathon participants felt the true significance of their roles in the project and applied their efforts to the fullest on the speedy way to creating high tech apps. We all hope that our solutions will easily find their users.