Serenity One Dance Scoring Software - Tablet Edition

So I've been thinking, every time I run the scoring for a dance competition my conscience is destroyed by the fact that I have to print so many judging marksheets out. For example, if there are 6 judges, with 20 competitors that's 120 bits of paper… 20 competitors is quite small for a salsa competition, and some of the competitions I've been doing recently have 8-10 judges. So it quickly blows out to 100's of pages.

That's the primary reason for a re-think of the way Serenity One should work… the secondary motivation is the fact that someone has to then enter these figures into the system (twice). Not a really fun task.

This has brought me around the idea of writing a tablet version. I've evaluated hardware and development platforms and decided to use the Xamarin Mono for Android to develop a C# app for Android as my first attempt at making this a paperless solution. The reason I chose Android first was basically due to the cost of the hardware. Windows Mobile devices are expensive, and iPads are too. My prototype hardware platform is the Pioneer DreamBook 9.7". It's running Android 4 and is quite a nice device.

To support the "mobile" devices, I have decided to use ServiceStack.Net to expose a number of REST web services using Json. At this stage I will probably still host these on a local PC at the event, but there's no reason why I couldn't have it hosted on a cloud platform – just so long as reliable internet connectivity could be guaranteed during the running of a competition. More updates to come soon… including screenshots and code snippets…