Just in 24 Hours…
Well. This was probably the best hackathon (or named kodathon) in Turkey at 2013.
Kodathon was organized by kodcu.com, @seanxyu, @altugaltintas, @fkadev. First of all, thanks all of them for this wonderful event. Kodathon was at Koç University Nisantasi Campus which is near the American Hospital. There were approx. 15 group and it means 15 different ideas and apps in the competition.
We joined this kodathon as Smartface team, @OytunAtLinux, @faruktoptas, @gokhanmandaci and @gemcienes. Idea should based on Istanbul’s problems cause of main topic. Istanbul is a huge city and like all other big cities, it has lots of problems. That’s why we thought not only to focus on one specific problem. We tried to collect all the problems of Istanbul under a one social network, which we called it “kentbenim” (In English “CityofMine”).
We developed “kentbenim” by Smartface App Studio and gets it ready for iOS and Android just in a 15 hours of hard work. It’s totally ready for publish after 15 hours of work for both platforms. Also there was a server side of this application and it’s developed with PHP.
This is a social network, which you’re taking a picture of any Istanbul problem and tag it under sorted problem names. App will recognize your location and will post it through network. Users choices, which are tagged pictures of problems will shown in main page and people can vote these problems. Most voted problems will be up and thus, Istanbul’s problems sorted by citizens. This will show the fact of what people wants and what authorities doing. “CityofMine” is your app. Istanbul is your city. Problems are forcing you while trying to survive in this city life.
What we’ve done? How we start? Is it possible to create a social network app with Smartface only in a 15 hours?
Like all mobile apps, first we defined our rules of design and draw mock-up. We designed principals of app with using Adobe Photoshop. We found %70 percent of icons from web and %30 percent of icons was created by us. We used Adobe Illustrator for creating and modifying icons. It takes 6 hours. That’s probably because of my skills on Photoshop and Illustrator J
You can check our mock-up evolution here:
Then we implent our design to the app with using Smartface App Studio’s extremely easy drag&drop UI components. App Studio’s WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet design editor helps us to create what we draw on paper to get same thing from app. It was like a copying Photoshop pages to an app. It takes approx. 5-6 hours of work. Here are first screenshots of app while developing:
After that, we’ve started to write connections between app and server side. Also this was so easy with App Studio’s web client wizard tools and it takes 2-3 hours of coding in a script editor of App Studio.
I think after midnight most of us falling into sleep…
We woke up at 9 o’clock and prepared for jury. Jury look into every project and selected first 6 out of 15. “kentbenim” is also chosen by jury. And lastly, chosen 6 presented their projects to everyone and all participators selected first 3. Smartface crew’s project becomes 3rd at Kodathon 2013. 2nd was some kind of robotics projects and 1st was mobile payment and alert project for city buses of Istanbul.
Check it out our website: www.kentbenim.net
This is all about kodathon2013 and everybody enjoyed too much. It was fun!
See you next time…
