Speakon

Inspiration

I've been really curious to see what people standing at the bus stop or eating in a food court would say to the people around them, people they could see and hear, if they would remain anonymous. Speakon is a social feed that can only be written to and read by those who are within earshot of one another.

What it does

Speakon allows you to communicate anonymously with people within earshot. Speakon brings a new level of intimacy to anonymous chatting.

How I built it

Speakon is built using Evothings and PhoneGap to wrap the Javascript into a native iOS app, and then utilizes Firebase for the backend.

Challenges I ran into

The way I built this app (unknowingly) did not allow me to compile it correctly in Xcode while still having access to PhoneGap plugins. But it does work in the Evothings workbench.

I also spent a lot of time trying to set up AWS and host my images on S3. Little did I know that I could save them to Firebase since they were already in binary.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the first project that I have ever shipped at a hackathon. I am very proud of myself for doing so. This is also the first app that I have built myself, meaning I got to make all of the design decisions.

I'm also very proud of how much I learned doing this project. I know understand Angular on a whole new level. Getting those images to load via Firebase also made my entire weekend.

What I learned

I learned a valuable lesson. I took the easy route in getting started - using Evothings, and now I don't have a native iOS app. That's a bit of a bummer but it happens. I knew Evothings was too good to be true.

I also learned a lot about Angular. I use it almost everyday, but to do work inside of a system that I did not originally design. Getting to design this app was a great way to solidify and expand on the Angular that I already knew.

What's next for Speakon

For one of my design lab classes I am going to wrap Speakon correctly so that it works as a native app.

Built With

• angular.js
• estimotes
• firebase
• ionic