First off I would once more like to say a huge thank you to everybody that came along and worked so hard at IPhack, you all made the event really amazing. The apps that were built were incredible for such a short time frame and in tough conditions with flakey wifi being a constant battle!
I also owe a huge thanks to each and every one of the sponsors, you made the event possible and without your support it couldn't have happened at all. So thank you, Software East, Twilio, MediaBurst, Likely, AlfredApp, Github, CodeSchool and O'Reilly.
The whole idea behind IPHack was to create the beginnings of a software development community in Ipswich and I really think we made a great start at that yesterday. People had a great time, and really got behind each other when giving the demos and the support for each app was great. The encouragement as I was organising IPHack was also incredible and shows that Ipswich and the surrounding areas really wanted this sort of event and the discussions had at the event just further strengthened my belief in this.
Hacking!!
We got off to a bit of a rocky start as people arrived and Wifi access started to buckle under the pressure, and sadly this was the story of the day, and sadly made some of the demos more than a bit tricky! However, we perservered and far from worrying about it, everyone just carried on regardless and started hacking!
By lunch, wandering round showed some real progress and a lot of apps were already taking form and actually working demos of ideas were being shown around! I was genuinely stunned by the ingenuity and variety of the apps that were being created from recipe apps, to magic clocks!
Dinner was the standard fare of hackers everywhere; pizza, and a welcome break from some, quite frankly, furious coding. I swear I could see smoke coming from some of the keyboards! Things were really starting to take shape now although I think all of us were starting to flag, only a few hours remained!
By 8:30 we finished up and prepared for demos and we had some fantastic ones. Almost everyone had something to show, teams and individuals alike and I think everyone was amazed at what was created during the day. It's incredible what a crap load of coffee, red bull and a time constraint can do for productivity!
Demo Time!
Danders - A github repositry visualization tool using the github API and some very cool html5 canvas charts by Dan Higham and Anders Fisher
Rick Call - A hilarious automated Rick Rolling phone caller using Twilio's API by Robert Lee-Cann
The Amazing Yahoogle Weather App - A mashup of google maps and yahoo weather reports to display weather, and suggested appropriate attire on a map, complete with text messaging a link to buy the clothes, by Toby Hope, Tom Odell & James Rowlinson
Pubcrawlr - A very handy app for plotting a route for your Pubcrawl - enter your area and chose by distance or rating and the app will show you a map of your route on a google map and which pubs you should visit. Written by Emmanouil Spanoudakis, Chris Sinjakli, and William Harmer.
Magic Clock - Kerry Buckley built this awesome virtual replica of the the Weasleys' Family clock that shows his current location using the Google Latitude API.
Samplr - An app which used the Spotify API to pull the top 60 songs and played a short sample of each track written by - Paul Reid and Chris Brooking.
Gigity - Need a local gig? This app will look at your current location and find any gig that's happening nearby using Spotify written by Jon Hart
Wheres my coffee? - Scratching his own itch, Alasdair North built this app to let local business know when the lunch trucks arrive at big business parks by sending a text message upon arrival using the MediaBurst API. Very handy and I heartily approve of anything coffee related.
Invoice Agent - Matt Oakley built this Iphone app to pull data from the Free Agent api to display invoices and other useful stuff. Sadly a lovely compile error stopped Matt from showing it off.
Proper Wifi - Another itch scratched by Max Shelley. Max built this tool to show which places (coffee shops, bars etc) have "proepr wifi" as in wifi that doesn't need any codes, weird logins and other crap that so called "free wifi" often has, very useful indeed!
Graphbot - John Benton built a crowd sourced Scattergraph plotting servlet that pulls it's data from Twitter, we compared sarnies vs pizza consumption and found that people lie a lot.
Curry Club - Ian Tearle built an app that lets you and your friends check into the curry houses you visit using FourSquare and also it remembers what you ate where and your rating of it, so you never have to eat the same bad curry twice.
Sky Map - Dave Chatting made this app which plotted a single pixel of the sky from weather stations around the country to give a map of the sky. Turns out the UK is very, very grey.
Get Nugget - Ross Scrivener works for an SEO company and built a tool to let his customers access their Google Analytics information in much more useful, smaller nuggets, to answer simple questions.
Bicycle Club - Built by Charlie Banthorpe to gather data about his guerilla marketing campaign for the Bicycle Ball he is organising. The places at which the invites are found are plotted on a google map by the finder and Charlie can track them.
Hungergam - The winner of the competition! Michael Hanes built this recipe finding app using phone gap to see if it were possible to build a performant non-native iphone app. It allows the user to enter ingredients they have and it will show possible recipes that contain those ingredients.
The winners!
1st Place: Michael Hanes with Hungergram
Joint 2nd Place: Kerry Buckley with Magic Clock, Robert Lee-Cann with Rick Roll, and Max Shelley with Proper Wifi
Joint 3rd Place: William Harmer, Emmanouil Spanoudakis, Chris Sinjakli with Pubcrawlr and Gigity
Conference Raffle
http://softwareast.ning.com/ have been kind enough to donate two conference places to IPHack, and a quick random number generator has picked: Charlie Banthorpe and Matt Oakley as the winners.
Wrapup
A final thank you to everyone that came. I really hope you had as much fun as I did and I think we've proved there are enough hugely talented developers in the region to make a great community! Here's to IPhack 2!
Tom