A Showcase of the apps submitted to Leeds Hack 2011
Sausagefest
Affiliate window data uploaded to a OLAP cube and priced by value in sausages instead of pounds. Data analysis begins soon to find the meatiest tidbits of information! Pricing information was taken from Tescos to ensure consistency between brands ….
Feel The Vibe
A tool to instantly take any online article or document and turn it into a version which can be commented on and rated paragraph-by-paragraph. Ideal for voicing your opinion on news articles or providing feedback on the latest government white paper. Totally browser independent, requires no plug-ins.
Spotify Roulette
Ever wanted to find something random to listen to on Spotify but couldn’t? Lets Crowd source something to listen to. Login with Twitter. Hit Play Roulette and Wait. When a Follower tweets you back with an Artist we can find, we’ll automagically pop open Spotify with a Track from the Suggested Artist’s back Catalogue and Generate a Drag and Drop playlist to listen to if you want more. Just watch our for Rick Astely. He is never gonna give you up…. Or in LolCat…. Spotify Rouletter Hai Twitter I can has Artist of Musiack to Listen to nao pls? kthanxbai Hai from Twitter, you can has this man to listen to nao. kthanxbai. Iai make a playlist nao Hai spotify!
Weighted Down
Popular wisdom has is that one of the most effective weight loss techniques is to keep a food diary, to make you more conscious of what you’re eating. I’d never keep a paper diary on me, so weighted down aims to take it’s place. It’s much simpler to use than the “fully-fledged” apps like MyFitnessPal which attempt to do everything in one clumsy package. And it’s this simplicity that is it’s biggest feature. It also has a seinfield-esque overview of your last 30 days of weight loss progress, so you can see at a glance how well you’re doing … and hoping to appeal to the same sense of wanting to not break-the-chain.
Roller Derby Endurance Aid
At last! A hand help app on your smart phone designed by speed skater turned Broller Derby star: Jammie Dodger of the Nottingham Roller Girls! This aid is similar to a circuit training bleep test. Allowing the trainer to enter the total number of laps to complete and the speed from which to start. The clever application indicates when you should be half way round the track, 2 seconds away from the finish and bleeps when you’ve completed your circuit. The laps get faster by one second for each pass, so set it for 100 laps, keep the pace and see how long your girls can stay on for the ride. Available on both the iPhone and Android. Artwork by Charlotte Thomson. Concept by Dave Langlois. Designed and Built
commutapp
Early warning system that your commute has incidents or roadworks that might delay you, allowing you to leave early, chose a different route or let that loved one know you might be a tad late. Lets you know via SMS, prowl and many other methods* *or non, depending on how much we get done
jsBlueLine
Web based learning/practice app for bellringing. Simulates a set of bells ringing a method, with both audio and visual representations. Allows the user to take control of one.
Democrapong
Simple collaborative pong game written in javascript using HTML5 canvas. Uses any number of clients connected to a Node.js server to calculate an analogue position based on simple vote data. Based on a modernised version of an experiment performed by Loren Carpenter co-founder of Pixar in the 80′s.
Hang the DJ
This hack is for that awkward moment when hosting a party of having to choose a playlist (a cringe worthy task). Instead, let ‘Hang the DJ’ decide the playlist through the power of sms messages, last.fm, democracy and Spotify. Attendees simply text the name of the artist they like or track they would like to hear. Through the powers of proportional representation their tracks/artist will at some point be played, with preference given to tracks that are specifically picked. By falling back on last.fm & the spotify popularity ratings the hack picks a set of music to suit the whole audience, not just one person, that way everyone is unhappy. The system also allows for listening parties whereby multiple users can connect to the same Hang the DJ server and all listen to the same songs at the same time. Everyone in the listening party can add tracks and vote to skip tracks, but importantly they have to listen to the same thing at the same time e.g. forced music discovery amongst friends. It is envisaged that the application could be used in bars where the staff don’t feel like choosing music. Equally customers could tune in to hear what music was actually playing in the bar before they get there! Or even vote ahead of time to steer the music to their taste. It is made up of three parts: -Php/perl/curl hack to manage the voting of tracks and sending/receiving by sms -C/C++/wget/portaudio/boost client that actually plays back music from a ‘hang the dj’ server using libspotify -Server visualisation which grabs pictures proportionally of the artists that are making up the current mix of music for displaying in a bar on a big screen.
ebuyer Bobsleigh Blight
Thieves have stolen an ebuyer truck, and you, the Winter Olymics bobsleigh champions, must chase after them using your amazing bobsleigh skills!
999 Now
Heart attack victims need help urgently. With a database of trained first responders, ’999 Now’ seeks to get *help* to casualties as quickly as possible. Ambulances get to a casualty on average, 7 minutes after a 999 call. However, in heart attack cases the application of CPR (from anybody) within the first 3 minutes is critical – it doubles the chances of a casualty’s survival. The system employs a network of volunteers, a web portal, geolocation and SMS messages to get help to *where* it’s needed *when* it’s needed. It augments the emergency services, and it does not replace them. If you needed CPR, would you accept help from a trained volunteer within 3 minutes, or would you prefer to wait 7 minutes (or more) for the ambulance crew?
SMSafe
#ZOMG! What’s my my thing again? We’ve all done it right? Stuck on the continent, mobile provider charging huge amounts of money for roaming data and you’ve forgotten the pin number for your holiday credit card! You want to buy that multi-colored sombrero, or the bull shaped clock, or the services of a young woman… #Never fear, SMSafe is here! Simply sign up to SMSafe and all your “forgetting shit like a moron” woes go away! Securely* store your pin number, bank details, passport number, driving licence details, medical details or, in fact, anything in SMSafe and you’ll instantly have access to it all, even without roaming data! We’ll send you any of your details when you text our SMSafe bot your password and the item you want it to retrieve and we’ll SMS it to you, wherever you are! So, sign up today and start benefiting by getting your shit when you need it most – even with the power of the internets! *We store it securely, there are no guarantees your network provider treats your SMS’s as securely as we do!
SMS Hunt
Create a treasure hunt for teams to solve by SMS: Teams are given clues one at a time by SMS – only after each clue is solved is the team given the next clue. If you pass, you forfeit that clue forever! Administrators can sit in their ivory towers watching the status updates come in and gloat at how hard their clues have been for their poor victims.
Barebones – Winner of ‘Hodges Special Prize!
If we’re going to be honest, the £500 we each spent on our iPads was a massive waste of money. Don’t get me wrong, we all take them to client meetings to try and impress them by alluding to our super connected lifestyles, but all it was really used for was to play Plants Vs. Zombies whilst waiting for the meeting to start. We used to go into meetings, put the iPad away, pull out a notepad and pen and draw some piss poor biro sketches that impressed no-one! Barebones is a super simple wire-framing application. It’s intention is to act as a tool to help you quickly sketch out ideas for a website or application to a client during those difficult early meetings. Barebones provides an intuitive gesture based interface that allows you to rapidly layout an attractive, ordered, low fidelity wireframe in the shortest timeframe possible.
Let me know when…
An online service for a user to generate a wish list of high cost items they would like to buy, but only when they go down in price. The user selects the price they are willing to pay and should the price of the item fall to that level the user receives a test message and an email with an affiliate link to buy the item at that price.
Weeeee!
Its a little game for ebuyer. Check here for latest updates. http://leeds-hack.appspot.com/ This is javascript and uses html/css rather than the canvas. It should run ok in most browsers although I’ve only tested it in chrome/firefox so far. There is also a chance it might run on ipads/phones/android but I suspect it will be too slow.
Voterbot
Realtime SMS voting app. Text to vote and view the election results update in realtime. Ballots counted using an STV (Single Transferable Vote) algorithm; better results than the X-Factor or UK general elections.
PleasePledge! – Winner of the Affwin Challenge
A hack that allows charities to express an interest in a product to a number followers. The followers can pledge cash via sms for buying the product. The products all link through to entries from the afwin database.
AutoLinkr
Monetize your site automatically
SMS Pub Crawl
A user finds themselves in a town (Leeds, for example).. A user calls +447786209973 .. They are then given a text saying which first pub to go to. “Go to Mr Foley’s”.. The user drinks beer with her mates. The user sends a text, which can be gibberish back to the number.. The user gets a text saying which pub to go to, the nearest pub and the directions to that pub.. “Go to O’Neil’s. Head north on Park Row, Turn left at the Headrow, Turn Right at Calverly Street, Turn left at Great George Street”.. ——————————————————————— Technical details: Web app uses esendex API to respond to txts to send txts.. All england pubs are imported from OpenStreetMap in a PostGreSql / Spatial Postgis database.. Spatial query is find pubs within a mile, from the starting pub, ordered by the distance from the starting pub.. a record of pubs for each user is kept so you wont go back to the same one.. Cloudmade.com directions API is used to get the directions from one pub (lat lon) to the next pub (lat lon) It uses osm data to do the routing.. Turn by turn directions is parsed and sent back..
TxtVia – Winner of the esendex challenge
A Google Chrome Extension and Android Systems App that allows the user to send messages from Chrome through their Android Phone to any given recipient or recipients and receive the replies in Chrome. Simply put, much like iChat yet for Mobile Text Messages. The user will also be able to assign many devices and choose which to send with or even use Esendex. With a fantastic UI and great functionality, this App, when polished will go a long way as a useful and time saving tool. Lets hope the Judges agree. Looking forward, we will be integrating reports, push all messages to device, gather missing messages and Safari/Firefox/Opera Extensions, just to name a few. And on top of that we finished – http://magrails.com/ Manchester First Agile / Rails Conference ( Shameless Plug )
Tribes For Forums
A self indulgent hack to address a specific problem. As forums grow the normally get very noisy and hard to keep up with. In real life (in the pub) when the group gets too big it’s splits into smaller groups, but with a forum the people with the the time can be in everyone’s face all the time. What Tribes for forums does is uses statistical data from post ‘like’ buttons to group link minded groups into ‘tribes’ where they can converse with people whose posts they have traditionally favoured. For this hack it’s been developed as an app for the ip.board forum, but it’s designed to be extendable to any form that supports liking posts and multiple user groups.
Ad in a box
Why use the 75 adverts for Currys on AffiliateWindow if you can get custom ads for the 7000+ adverts in the product feed!
shlf.me
This would be long and detailed, but Dom is shouting at us to submit NOW. Well, about 10 minutes ago. So… Conceived as a wish listing and “what do I own” system built around a subset (~100,000 books) from the AffWin data feeds. Adds a social element to “what have I bought” and “what do I want to buy” – potentially expandable to a wide range of sites/markets/feeds etc – and creates buzz between friends, sending purchases through affiliate links… We think it’s pretty cool. 
BzzFinder
Social media buzz about products!
Human Powered Web Server
humanweb is a web server powered by humans. Web requests coming into the server are forwarded on to humans via Jabber. Their html responses are then sent back via IM and the server sends it back to the web browser. The humans have 90 seconds to respond otherwise the web browser is sent a timeout error. Any human can start serving requests by adding the humanweb@jabber.org contact as a buddy.
CashApp – Winner of the Coding Futures Challenge
CashApe or iPad!
Badger Badger Badger
Attempt to make sound bounce between multiple computers.
My First HTML
My first ever HTML and CSS
Pingback: Leeds Hack 2 | oo-de-lallyd Leeds Hack 2 | golly, what a day!
Pingback: Leeds Hack 2 | Michael Heap