Guest Post - A Reflection on a Pebble Hackathon
This is a guest post by Matt Langlois, developer of the Pebble Meetup app, contributor to pebble.js, and active Pebble developer.
The Time to Code hackathon in Ottawa, Canada on July 11th and 12th was a huge success! We had developers from all over the city come and join us to create their first app. We even had a developer who had never touched code before join us to create his first app ever!
Schedule
Saturday started off with a wonderful presentation by Cherie from Pebble’s California HQ teaching people how to create their first watchface. The presentation was spot on, and she even had a shout out to my Meetup app when she was discussing the timeline. The rest of the day was spent creating apps and turning coffee and snacks into code.
The second day we let the developers work on their projects all day. Jonathan, the creator of Music Boss and Ottawa’s Pebble Rockstar, also stopped by on Sunday to speak with the developers and check out some of the creations. In the afternoon developers had a chance to present their hacks and creations to the panel of judges.
Winners
The winners, in order from right to left.
Some pretty amazing ideas became a reality at this event. Here's a rundown of our winners:
Kurt (MetaDark) created his first ever app for the Pebble platform this weekend. He designed a game called circle attack. His app makes use of plenty of API functionality such as: colors, animations, button events, and randomization. I had a chance to speak with the developer and it sounds like he really thought his app through by optimizing it in every way possible to use up as little resources as possible making it run just as well for Aplite. He was the winner of a Pebble Time.
Jaime took his first shot at Javascipt using PebbleJS to create his food truck app. Check out the source here. His app is more of a utilitarian app providing a list, sorted by distance, of the nearest food trucks. For his app, Jaime won a Pebble Steel.
Alex was the creator of a watchface known as SpringPebble. It was one of the few watchfaces created during the event and the judges really liked it. It made use of animations and colours in a harmonizing way. For his watchface Alex won an Original Pebble.
Finally, we decided to choose Joseph as a runner up - he made a 5 pin bowling app. This app had a very fluid user experience but was unfortunately not fully complete, hence the reason he was the runner up.
Other than the above listed winners we also had some other pretty creative ideas! A group of 3 friends created a way to input text using only gestures. Another developer created a way to setup a home location so you will never miss the bus at that stop! There were also some games and other watchfaces created which I haven’t seen on the Pebble before.
Looking Forward
Hopefully, the development doesn’t stop here for these Pebblers. I look forward to seeing further refined versions of their apps on the Pebble appstore.
What a great event - I hope I am able to run an event like this in the future!
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