#iSoc12 All about OAuth (and a BSoD)
Time flies if you’re having fun. The second week is already over, we’re entering the last week! I’m working on the iRail 3.0 project, together with Jens, Hannes and Koen. The base of our project is a nice little abbreviation, solomidem (Social location mobile identity management). It will combine all the social media into one identity.
To make secure calls to the different API’s, we need to implement OAuth. The last version, 2.0, is really nice to work with. The first version of OAuth however is **** and it’s really a shame that Twitter still uses this version. While this OAuth 1 is driving me crazy, my laptop isn’t happy with all that coding. Once a day, my laptop shuts down immediately. Kernel-power event 41, the biggest frustration ever! I even got this nice BSoD:
My nice BSoD. I think WinCDEmu was the root of all trouble.
Other than these issues, I’m really having a great time at iSoc12. Really nice atmosphere with like-minded people and interesting projects. I am also really impressed by some coders, especially Jeroen from The DataTank. He’s quite a genius with a keyboard in his hands! I also had a punishment in the second week: I forgot my adapter of my laptop, so I bought couques (koffiekoeken) for everyone. I think that everyone hopes that somebody will get a punishment, cause everybody loves couques in the morning. 😀
This last week will be a bit different: the Gentse Feesten have started (and we have a nice app for it!), which can cause some hangovers at the office. You’re still welcome to jump by though! 😉
#iSoc12 Gentse feesten app: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature
Dear reader of this fabulous blog, i’m Michael and this week I worked hard on an app for the Gentse Feesten.
The date is Friday the 6th when Pieter asked me if I could make/finish the prototype of an app made during the hackathon that Tuesday. Knowing the Gentse Feesten started the next Saturday, this would be a rush project. And that’s where it went wrong for a bit.
The app
First of all, let me explain what the app is about. With this app you can search for events during the Gentse Feesten, get more info on them and add them to your timeline planning. With this mobile planning you can always see what you wanted to do that day.
Besides these features, we have the ‘live’ features as well. There’s the ‘live’ mode itself, where you can check during the Gentse Feesten on a map where you are, and what the closest current events are at that moment. Thanks to this you can easily see what’s going on at the other squares without going to them and realizing you were at the best one already.
Another ‘live’ feature is the toilets feature. With this you can see on a map where you are, and where the closest toilets around you are. By clicking on them you can have more info about the toilet. Is it outside, inside, …? You got the answer there!
The release
The Friday after, the 13th of July, we released the app. Thanks to the help of Miet in the last 3 days, the app got finished around 7PM.
With no time for testing left we put the app immediately on the Android store and on the internet for the iOS and Windows Phone users (http://gf12.be).
Once the app was out there in the wilderness, the problems started. Because of the lack of time for testing, there were bugs of course. Twitter became an official bug help center (which is good of course) and also on Facebook and mail people were committing bugs. Since then we worked really hard to get all bugs fixed for the online version, which is hopefully done. By Monday there should be an update for the Android app itself.
I’m proud to say that the fixed app now is a really useful thing during the Gentse Feesten. I used it myself already and it helped me a lot!
This week has been a really hectic week, but I’m glad I did this. Not only for me, but for the whole #iSoc12 team.
I learned a lot of things (especially after the release) which are also applicable to the other teams. Especially Christophe from the iRail team gave us a lot of good feedback to work on.
The #GF12 app was a nice test for #iSoc12, and I’m sure going to inform the others about what I learned of this project.
#iSoc12 The second week of FlatTurtle
Hi faithful iRail blog readers. My name is Nik and I am working on the FlatTurtle project. In this post I will recap last week’s events on the project and share some of my experiences with #iSoc12.
The project
When the week started, we decided to move to a Jumping Castle PHP framework called CodeIgniter. This was a bit of a challenge for Glenn and me because we were new to this framework and were pretty inexperienced with php. After two days we finished porting the previous project to the CodeIgniter project, after that we started working on the back-end and started thinking about the possibilities with the interface.
On Thursday evening we got the specifics of our projects that we have to finish on Wednesday. We have to finish a working tablet interface to magnify the Turtles on the screen. The back-end that commands the screen is working, and now we are working on authentication, the Android app for the tablet and we are fixing small bugs in the InfoScreens.
The pitches
This week Pieter introduced the war table to the iSoc teams. At the war table the iSoc teams would pitch their project to important people in the open data/business world.
On Tuesday we had our first pitch to Joke De Nul. We only got notified 15 minutes before the pitch so you can imagine that we were pretty nervous. All in all I think the pitch went pretty well and in hindsight there was no reason to be nervous.
Pitching FlatTurtle to Joke De Nul
On Thursday we had our second pitch, and we were told it was a very important one. We had to pitch our project to the investor of FlatTurtle Cristophe Petitjean. We were (again) pretty nervous, probably even more than last time. Luckily Jens joined us for this one and we had some time to prepare this time, so we made a small presentation. The pitch went great (see Yeri’s post), and it was a great experience!
My iSoc12 experience
I am happy that I accepted this student job instead of Bouncy Castle For Sale going to work in a factory, but that choice really was a no-brainer. #iSoc12 is everything that was promised, it is a learning experience that I would recommend to anyone interested in not having a ‘normal’ vacation job. At first I was not looking forward to do presentations and ‘pitch’ the project, but now I am pretty happy that we had to, it’s something you have to learn eventually so why not start now!
#iSoc12 Take a look inside the design!
This is the final logo for our App. The key hole refers to a kind of curious voyeurism. The user peeks virtually through the keyhole of different buildings throughout Ghent.
When you open the app the first thing you’ll see is this pop-up screen with a little introduction. you can always go back to this page with the question mark-button (see last image).
Next thing you’ll need is a navigationbar. I’m not quit sure wich one is the best, all feedback is welcome. The left button is used to navigate to home and the right button to go to the map. The one in the middle will get you to the scanner.
Below you find the four buttons on the homescreen.
MUST SEE: buildings you must see based on the favorites of all the users.
FAVORIETEN: buildings you have marked with must see.
LOOK LATER: buildings you scanned but didn’t watch the video from.
SEEN: All the buildings you’ve scanned and seen the video from.
Above you can see the map-page. When you slide open the legend, you can see which color stands for which category. You’ll be able to check or uncheck the categories you want to view on the map.
I hope this will give you some more visualisation of our app, and again, all feedback is welcome!
This post was also published on Apps For Ghent.
#iSoc12 The power of a motivated dynamic team
You might have noticed, but I’m not one of those early birds. I really wish I was, but alas.
This morning I got woken up by Christophe PJ, share holder en sole investor of FlatTurtle to thank Glenn, Nik, Jens, Miet, Pieter and myself for the amazing presentation and meeting we had yesterday.
“I feel totally rejuvenated”, he said, “The spirit is high, the motivation grew, what an amazing team! Can we make them work even more for us?!” But it didn’t end there; “be sure to take pictures, they have to be featured on our website! This is the community we are always talking about.”
I don’t usually get woken up with good news, but I guess this, for once, was. 😉
To have a “big man” make time in his busy schedule, and to Bouncy Castle For Sale leave the corporate world, just for #iSoc12, and have his mind blown is … Well … Pretty cool, I guess.
TurtleTeam (yes, I just made this up on the spot) quickly pitched what is FlatTurtle. Although Christophe is an insider, he’s a man that loves hearing opinions and feedback from everyone. So having “the story” told by fresh people is always something cool to hear.
Afterwards they continued to explain what they were working on. An interaction-and-touch-interface that will automagically give you power over our digital signage. And not only that, we actually demoed an early prototype.
Miet demonstrates the use of the FlatTurtle control tablet.
To add some spritz to the whole thing, the prototype they are working on now has to be finished and presentable by Wednesday evening. After that he’s taking it straight to a potential customer. Talk about live action.
As for TurtleTeam; it’s time to chew bubble gum and kick some ass.