Building the Miss Switzerland 2004 Voting System

For the official election of Miss Switzerland 2004, conducted by national Swiss Broadcasting Company, SFDRS, Morsthich Project Services was contracted to design and develop the voting system. The Miss Switzerland event attracts nationwide attention and is produced as a live broadcast on the main national television channel. Morsthich selected Runtime Revolution to build the system.

For years, Revolution has been our tool of choice for creating rock solid solutions intended for use in time-critical environments. Revolution made it possible for our small company, Morsthich Project Services, to take the risk and responsibility of providing the software solution for the official election of Miss Switzerland, a national event.

Functional Specifications

The voting system consisted of client software for each of the eight contest judges in the studio, host software for management and coordination of the voting process for the system operators. During the contest, members of the judge panel entered their decisions into the client software using drag and drop. The operator then used the host system to retrieve the judgements from the client systems over a network, calculate the votes to select the candidates for the next round and produce a printed report for the director of the show, the moderator and the judge panel supervisor.

Developing the Voting System

By communicating directly using TCP/IP, the host software re-configured the client systems in preparation for each new round of the contest, with contestant names, pictures and voting instructions. During each round, television companies delivered SMS (text message) and telephone votes from the public to the system. The live nature of the event placed a time-critical emphasis on the system, with no time for crashes or transmission delays. Votes and calculations had to occur within a very short time period during television commercial breaks.

Why Revolution

Revolution enabled a safe, sound solution to meet the requirements of the Miss Switzerland event exquisitely. Revolution provided all of the elements required to develop a stable and technically sophisticated system, with a well designed and easy to understand user interface for the judge panel members. What's more, the host and client applications, which had to run on Windows PC's, were developed entirely on our platform of choice, Mac OS X. Not a single line of code was written on the Windows platform itself.

It's a Wrap

Morsthich Project Services, a software development company based in Zug, Switzerland, which specializes in creating software to meet unusual or demanding specifications. Thomas has extensive experience delivering solutions with Revolution; his work includes kiosk applications for Expo 02 (the Swiss National Exhibition) and real-time applications for training purposes, including CyberFirm™, a network based business simulation.