[hackerspaces] App for maker carnival, independent maker faires, and general events

[Florencia Edwards]

We wanted to have a android app for our mini maker faire in Santiago. This
is because a lot is going on and an app can help you out a little to know
what activities are happening where, see the map, share stuff, rss of news,
etc...  I sent the people of maker faire an email asking if they had a
repository with the code of their Maker Faire apps, for others to use, and
they told me it was not open source. I was really bummed out.

No one had programming app experience at our makerspace and we were all
busy doing more hardware projects for the makerspace (witch is way more fun
than making apps, hehe). I tried yapp like other mini maker faires did,
 but they have this horrible templates  they make you use, unless you pay
for not having a customizable template. This seemed like bad attitude to me
so I didn't go for it . Than there are more sophisticated free ways to make
an app, but even though it's easy, it takes longer (like http://appery.io/)
or intel's new XDK software tomake apps witch is great (
http://xdk-software.intel.com/).

But we just had five days to make it, and debug it , so we went along with
this: http://www.infinitemonkeys.mobi/
This is great for maker faire apps, it allows you to have the background
you want, and it has some built in functions for events like calendar,
tickets, map, directions. The best is that you can put your custom html
code , so we put in the schedule part, a google calendar (where you can se
the event and add to your own calendar (you can use any ical though), in
the photos, a RSS of the places where we store photos (it can be flickr,
for example) since there will be new photos at the maker faire, it's always
updating. We also get a chat, and we where able to insert a customized
google map of the venue with indications. I fully recommend this, for this
kind of events.  It's free with ads, and it charges 1 dolar a month to
remove ads. But if you give them feedback you get a month free inserting
the code IHELPED.

You can see our app here:
http://appstore.monk.ee/details.php?appid=100475124 there is an online
html5 version, and the .apk in that page. Hope it helps everyone.

Cheers!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20131122/4a1a7cd7/attachment-0001.html>