[TBA] 2015 Season Recap

[Eugene Fang]

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's competition!

This season brought some really great updates to The Blue Alliance, thanks to some outstanding effort from our volunteer contributors. Here are some of the major things we launched this season:

• An Android app for easy access from a mobile device (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato, Nathan Walters, Bryce Matsuda, Adam Corpstein, Jerry Morrison, and GitHub user tanis7x)
• myTBA, which lets you subscribe to push notifications for your favorite teams (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato)
• The "live ticker" to GameDay, which was also mobile-optimized and brought into the Android app, so you can watch as updates fly by for your favorite teams of for all events. (Thanks to Phil Lopreiato, Nathan Walters, and Jerry Morrison)
• A brand new datafeed to make use of the new FRC API
• A way for volunteers to input match data in real-time, which was used for Champs

Thanks to everyone's contributions this year we provided information to a record number of people! From February 20 to April 26, we had:

• 983,000 sessions (417,000 desktop, 276,000 mobile web, 290,000 Android)
• 3039 peak concurrent viewers on GameDay
• 3564 new user accounts created
• 320K push notifications sent
• 7.1M API Hits
• 6,000 android app installs
• Thousands of videos added thanks to people helping crowd source

As a reminder, The Blue Alliance is completely powered by volunteers -- if you have a project you want to get involved with, we’ll be happy to have you! Are you graduating high school, want to stay involved with FRC, but don’t have time to mentor a team? Help out TBA -- there are lots of ways to get involved. Much of our data is crowd-sourced; you can help submit match video, or data from offseason events. Our crowd-sourcing efforts are coordinated via our Facebook group -- feel free to post if you want to help out!

All The Blue Alliance software is also fully open-source! Join the mailing list and check out our GitHub, which has getting started guides for both the website and Android app. If you’re not sure where to start contributing, take a look at the hackathon ideas list for the website and for the app. We’ll be posting details about a global hackathon later in the summer, which is a great way to start getting involved.

Finally, we’d like to thank our sponsors VEXpro and Firebase who help make the site financially possible.

[JB987]

All of you ROCK! A million thanks from The High Rollers.

[MisterJ]

The Blue Alliance is the most important website I use for scouting, organizing, collecting videos for school and sponsors, etc. (Err... tied for #1 with Chief Delphi.) Your efforts are very, very appreciated!

I love looking at team histories to see what a long and arduous process it was for some the world's elite teams to become elite. It gives me a lot of hope working with my team.

[Hallry]

The Blue Alliance has done absolute wonders for the FRC community. Thanks so much to the volunteers that put so much time and dedication into it.

[plnyyanks]

Thanks to everybody for using the cool new features and making them a success!

We'll be starting to plan for next year soon, so if there are any features you'd like to see in TBA, let us know!

[dodar]

Virtual Reality. I want to feel like I am actually at the competition.

[GreyingJay]

I would love an iPhone/iPad app so I don't have to look at my Android friends so jealously

[mott]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

I would love an iPhone/iPad app so I don't have to look at my Android friends so jealously

...OR, better yet, get an Android phone!

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by mott

...OR, better yet, get an Android phone!

(Guess I opened myself up for that one)

[AlexanderTheOK]

I have probably spent as much time on The Blue Alliance as I have on Chief Delphi over my four years. This year I probably spent MORE time on it than on Chief Delphi.

Being able to view statistics, videos of every team's every match, being able to see statistics and reveal videos. Being able to watch an entire regional match by match. It's amazing.

And now with the ticker and MyTBA? I don't know if I could do without TBA anymore.

[thejerishbrown]

Big thanks from team 4501. Without TBA, our scouts would have had a much more difficult task at championships, and the team members wouldn't have been able to keep up with our progress back home.

The incredibly well-made Android App was one of my most useful assets during competitions. Thanks again to TBA and their wonderful volunteers. Looking forward to seeing what comes next season!

[Orionbug]

Would it be possible to get a windows phone app produced?
The website doesn't play very nicely and the app we do have is very hard to use.

[Jacob Bendicksen]

Thanks so much for all you do - it's an incredibly valuable resource.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

I would love an iPhone/iPad app so I don't have to look at my Android friends so jealously

Someone had started working on it, but it looks like there hasn't been too much activity lately. If you or someone you know is good with making iOS apps, feel free to stop by the mailing list and let us know so we can give out access to the repo.

Until this gets moving, you can at least use FRC Spyder for match and score information.

Alternatively, you can send me a recent iPhone.

Originally Posted by Orionbug

Would it be possible to get a windows phone app produced?

With the new Windows 10 Universal App functionality coming soon, I'm going to use this time to learn how to build apps for Windows, which will now include Windows Phone (yay Microsoft!). While this is certainly not any guarantee, I hope to have something basic ready by Kickoff 2016.

[Adam8234]

Thanks Eugene, It was a great season. I'm glad I could help. The Android App took a great success this season. Thank you all!