Book Up!

Windows 8 Workshop

 

This app was created in the Windows 8 Workshop: Programming Smart Phones for the benefit of the Community (Fall 2013/14), taught by Prof. Yehuda Afek, Eyal Carmel (PM in Microsoft) and Hillel Avni.

 

We were given a free reign to choose an app to develop, as long as it had a benefit for the community. We had some other original ideas, but finally we all agreed about Book Up.

 

Reading books widens one's horizons, helps us develop our imagination, teaches us about history and has many other attributes. We think it's important to encourage reading books in an era where computers rule.

 

 

Our App's Features

 

As well as developing an app for the community, we were instructed to use as many Winodws 8 Phone features as possible.

List of features:

 

1. OCR usage: using Abbyy Cloud OCR SDK we are able to allow users to take a picture of their book, and we able to extract the text.

 

2. Windows Azure Database: in Azure DB we save all the information: user's profile (Id, coordinates, password), libraries' and books' profiles.

 

3. Google Search: extarcting information about the books in Google Books and using Google Books API.

 

4. GPS: calculating distances between current user and different libraries, depending on the book searched.