Ten (10) dedicated men and women have worked feverishly, in secret this past month on an iPhone app for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. All of us are unpaid volunteers. Six (6) of us are iPhoneDevCamp alumni (*):
I think we may have achieved a record for the launch of such a complex app in such a short period, and many excellent features were dropped for lack of time. It was really fun to develop, knowing the power of features like Call Friends (which sorts your address book by key battleground states) and Get Involved (which uses CoreLocation to direct you to the nearest Obama Headquarters). The app was designed as a means to donate your time in discreet segments — we call it ‘micro-volunteering’.
A huge portion of the code was taken from Jonathan Wight’s superb TouchCode repository, which won “Best Open Source” at iPhoneDevCamp 2 this summer.
We use Basecamp for bootstrapping, Subversion for revisions, Lighthouse for bug tracking (thanks entp!), Google Groups for our (stellar) Beta list, and Campfire for our engineering chat. Check out our Facebook Group as well.
Special thanks to John Geleynse and Erik Lammerding at Apple for their attention and encouragement.
Help us make the app better by sending email to iphone@barackobama.com. Use it to call your friends! The election is little more than a month away, and your action can make the difference.
During the playback, you’ll notice some visual flutter on occasion. This is a result of having to crop from one portion of the Connect video window to another, while our Satellites tuned in. The audio should be seamless, however. In the future, we’ll avoid having other video feeds showing while Keynote presentations are in view.
What an incredible weekend! We are simply floored by the quality and diversity of the attendees and the resulting work. Here are the Hackathon winners in order of most valuable prize to honorable mention:
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A year in the making, iPhoneDevCamp 2 is tomorrow! In the past year a number of great sources of information have cropped up around iPhone development. We hope to gather as many as we can for this weekend’s event. Here are just a few to get started - feel free to comment with more:
Apple March 6th Event http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap/
On March 6, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone software roadmap, released the iPhone Software Development Kit, and introduced the iPhone Enterprise Beta Program.
WWDC 2008 Keynote Address http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc08/
Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil the latest products at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco. See the video-on-demand event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.
iPhone Developer Program http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
Most of the content is blocked until you sign up for the program, but take a look.
We’ve been working hard with these people to create a live video, audio, and chat bridge between our locations. Developers in any location can be eligible to win our Hackathon Contest, and we’ve created a special Best of Satellite prize. This will be a record-setting remote collaboration across eight time zones!
We are still seeking volunteers to help organize some other Satellites of interest:
“Dominic Sagolla researches and tests new features for Adobe products in development. Â After hours, this diehard Mac enthusiast creates applications for the iPhone.”
iPhoneDevCamp is a not-for-profit organization that gathers regularly to develop applications for iPhone and iPod touch using both the native SDK and web standards. The event format is "unconference" or Barcamp-style, featuring content from the participants themselves. Read more about the history of iPhoneDevCamp at Barcamp.org.
Ten (10) dedicated men and women have worked feverishly, in secret this past month on an iPhone app for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. All of us are unpaid volunteers. Six (6) of us are iPhoneDevCamp alumni (*):
