Less than one month after the iPad 3G release, last Saturday, eighty "hacks" (journalists) and "hackers" (developers) gathered to learn, collaborate, and create "the killer iPad application" in an adrenaline-driven 48-hour iPad application developer boot camp -- the first Hack/Hackers Unite. Local journalists, developers, and designers collaborated in a KQED alcove to conceive a new iPad app to either tell a story to the public or convey new tools for journalism. The event culminated in a presentation session, where each team explained their app and its uses in front of a mock group of investor-judges.
Using the larger yet portable screen area of the iPad, a team turned a traditional quiz game into an HTML5 touchscreen-based board game called QuizShot. Each player presses on his own corner of the board to "buzz in" to answer a question fed from an RSS feed. Wrong answers amount in point deductions, while right answers up the score. According to the team leader, Staci Baird, the app was developed "to get journalism students to read the news [more often]."
NewsAppr is a multi-level news feed app, that uses the iPad's multitouch zoom features to load more detailed content, with each pinch. Following the design principle that the iPad screen is large enough so that zooming in and out to change font size becomes unnecessary, the team remapped this property to create a working prototype of a new way to quickly navigate and selectively load data. The team marketed the application as a possible new media business model for newspapers (especially newspaper consortiums), as they whet the reader's appetite for information with first and second tier free general articles, but charge a nominal fee for higher tier articles on more specific content.
Citizen Kid News is an interactive iPad-based curated news portal for children, with a game-like system that awards points for interaction, such as voting, and eventually contributing news. Having successfully distributed a storybook version of the app, team leader Valerie Mih believes the iPad market is an ideal outreach outlet for dispersing this app to children.
WhosReppin.me is a socialmedia-based feedback website that feeds "snapshots of what your representatives are up to," and allows users to instantly share positive or negative content as identified by hashtags in retweets of the snapshot URL. Geocoding is used as reverse-lookup of a user's rep.
Open Margins is a prototype idea for a "smartbook" that lets users share their annotations paperlessly and wirelessly. Drawing from crowdsourced answer-providing websites like Vark, the team explained that users can attach questions in context. By using the iPad's zoom features, users can zoom from a general summary of a text, to deeper levels, including user comments and annotations from Wikipedia and other reference sources. Shaking the iPad records an entry in what the team called a "database of discontent", and users can see from a "frustrometer" a heatmap indicating others who also found the particular page difficult. The team hopes to "do for books what delicious did for the web."
A total of twelve teams presented their apps. The informal panel of judges chose Citizen Kid and WhosReppin.me as the apps that struck them as most memorable. The winners won iPad cases.
