Hackathon Contest Winners

Best Game: Tattle Talz

This year, the buzzword is: Games. ngmoco CEO Neil Young gave a compelling Keynote on the revolutionary nature of the iPhone specification for gaming. He also announced nglabs, and their offer to incubate 10 free apps without claim to any of the author’s intellectual property.

The ngmoco team sponsored this category, and got to help pick out this year’s Grand Prize winner.

iPhoneDevCamp alumni Nicole Lazzaro, Greg Schwartz, and Estelle Weyl made a great social game inspired by 2 truths and a lie and earned themselves a 17" MacBook Pro w/ 4GB RAM + Applecare .

Best Developer Tool / Developer Helper: REDACTED Debugger

Louis Gerbarg and Rob Marini created a way to get debug data from the iPhone itself, and serve it up locally to your Mac via webservice. They plan to Open Source the tool when ready. This feat earned them a white 2.1 GHz MacBook, sponsored by doubleTwist.

Best Web App: GreasePocket

Ishan Anand and Ajay Kapur have begun a project similar to GreaseMonkey for iPhone. This video shows their scripting-addition interface in Mobile Safari:

The stunning thing about this achievement it was entirely developed over the course of the event. The team earned themselves a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, and plan to Open Source the project when it’s ready.

Best Social App: sStitch

Tod Huffman demoed the full potential of this app privately before the proceedings, and then told us how he did it on stage. From the iusethis summary: “One area of innovation is our tag prediction UI. We do this to reduce the amount of typing it takes to properly tag an image. In the middle panel of our screen shot notice the tag ‘brushfire’ yields a predicted set of ‘fire, smoke, losangeles, california, wildfire’.

From the iPhone the organized photos go up to our server, which outputs geoRSS streams organizable by user or tag. The data can be imported into GIS systems such as Google Earth, as well as Common Operating Picture systems used by organizations such as the Red Cross or fire departments."

In a recent training exercise in San Diego Todd’s team imaged a real-life brush fire and got the data displayed in the command center 30 miles away within two minutes. Todd earned himself a $500 Apple Store Gift Certificate, sponsored by Tapulous.

Best Open Source: TouchCode

The major value of iPhoneDevCamp is Open Source. This year, we saw a trio of projects (XML, HTTPD, and JSON) called TouchCode, that were used during the event. For his selfless efforts and generosity, Jon Wight (aka @schwa) received an Apple Store Gift Certificate for an iPhone 3G from the Apple Phone Show.

Most Useful: TAXI!

Taxi is a fine example of utility and simplicity. It gives you the cross-streets, and the nearest cab company. With one tap it will call that cab (photos by Andrew Mager):

The plan is to use text messaging to arrange the rendezvous in the future, but it’s already faster than all other methods of cab-finding:

For their ingenuity and focus, Viewzi was proud to award the team an Apple Store Gift Certificate for a new iPhone 3G.

Most Educational: Harp

Here’s an instrument with a built-in education. Tap the circle of fifths, stay in a minor key, or just multi-touch the scales and you are learning how to play the harp on iPhone. Sciral received Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, a copy of VMware, and an Axio Messenger Bag.

Coolest App: iRa

For this demo, CEO Alex Bratton from Lextech Labs controlled 12 high-end security cameras in Chicago with an iPhone in San Francisco. You can pinch and expand to zoom in and zoom out, and swipe to turn the cameras. Here is a video demo.

Listen to the spontaneous awe in the audience as the multitouch controls are demonstrated:

We thought it would be very hard to judge the ‘Coolest App’ category, but controlling cameras over 3G with an iPhone is undeniably rad, and there was unanimous assent.

Three Lextech team members flew to the San Francisco gathering and three attended the satellite location in Chicago. Lextech also donated expertise and equipment to the event by providing a backup video broadcast to the Satellites.

The team received a backpack & TruePower from Axio, and a iV battery charger and U-Charge AC adapter from FastMac, as well as a copy of VMware.

Best Student App: Copy/Paste

Zac White actually demonstrated this for the first time on Saturday, asking for developers to include it in their code for the cross-application Copy/Paste demo on Sunday. Check out Andrew’s video of the act. Zac’s history-making innovation is 100% legal using the iPhone SDK. This earned him a Messenger Bag from Axio, Etymotic Earphones, a copy of VMWare, and a crafty but humble reputation.

Best Satellite App: Substrate (Portland)

In the Best of Satellite category, we had two terrific finalists. The boys from Portland won out with their simple, versatile procedural desktop-creator.

The song-lookup tool hum.itfor.us from the Denver team was a close second, edged out in an audience-vote recount. Both teams will receive JBL speakers for iPhone.

Best New Programmer: Fwerps

Tamagotchi is the best way to describe this app, produced by first-time coders over the weekend. If you pet Fwerps, they purr. Shake them and they get mad – you’ll need to rock them to calm down again. The team of learners received JBL Speakers for iPhone.

Best UI Tools: MagicTable

(Photo by the prolific Andrew Mager)

MagicTable is a simple yet powerful CocoaTouch developer library for building dynamic iPhone application user interfaces. If your application needs the user to enter data or make choices that you present in tabular form, MagicTable allows the you to build complex hierarchical table views with a simple XML configuration file, removing the need to write any table code.

The prize for this Open Source work is a pair of Griffin Evolve Speakers

Best 90 Minute App: Converter

This category was made up on the spot, shortly before the Hackathon Contest deadline. iPhoneDevCamp alumni Dan Wood of Karelia challenged himself to produce a simple currency converter in 90 minutes. Arbiter Christopher Allen attested to Dan’s agility, which earned him a MacHeist Bundle.

Honorable Mention

We had over 40 great submissions for the Hackathon Contest. These apps got a particularly good reception from the audience: Dudezap, Pushup, Paddleball, Hot iPotato, and Light Bikes. Honorable mentionees get 1 free year of web hosting, courtesy of (mt) Media Temple.

For more, check out the entire list from the Hackathon.

Thanks to everyone who participated this year, in San Francisco and around the world!

This entry was posted by Dom Sagolla on August 08th, 2008 and is filed under Apps, History, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.