Awards / 07 10, 2012
Haneke Design Team Scores Second Place in Inaugural Mayor’s Hack-a-Thon in Tampa
Haneke Design’s Director of Development, Jesse Curry, and Daniel Herman, Senior Designer, took runner up honors for their “Pix & Pans” mobile application in the first ever Mayor’s Hack-a-Thon. The Pix & Pans app allows users to submit images of what they like and don’t like in Tampa. Individuals can take photographs around the city, “pix” or “pan” the photo, and then submit it to the corresponding web site. The photo will then appear in the global feed where others can agree with the poster or add comments of their own.
The Haneke Design team envisions the app being used for everything from pointing out potholes to recommending restaurants.
“Our goal in creating this app was to have some buy-in from the city,” said Jesse Curry. “They would monitor the feed to see what people are excited about and note which problems people are finding in the city. They could use that information to address the problems and take the things that people love as an inspiration for future projects.”
Jesse and Daniel created the native application for iPhone using the iOS SDK and keylime library. They developed the corresponding web app using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Heroku, and Amazon S3. The team used a compressed version of the standard Haneke Design process to complete the server and app within the allotted time.
A web site and demo of Pix & Pans can be found here.
Hosted by Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, the 48-hour marathon competition held June 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency challenged participants to create Internet-based applications utilizing city data. Red Bull fueled teams cranked into the wee hours to create a usable app by the deadline, catching a few zzz’s around the hotel ballroom when the caffeine and sugar wore off or heading home for a couple hours’ of pillow time before rushing back to the site.
In addition to sending a team to compete, Haneke Design also sponsored the first time event.
“We’re passionate about participating in and supporting events like these that bring some of the best creative, design, and coding talent in the area together for a really cool showcase of local mobile expertise,” said Jody Haneke. “We couldn’t be more proud of Jesse and Daniel for coming up with such a novel way to engage people in sharing what they really like about this city and what they’d like to see less of. I heard they had a blast, but think they’re taking a nap right now to catch up on all that lost sleep!”
Additional winners and entries are listed here.