We recently challenged students at the University of York to participate in a one-day hackathon. Their remit was simple: design and build a file conversion app that uses the Zamzar API . A few hours later, the students demoed their six fantastic applications, and the winning apps were announced.
What did the students build? Who won? Read on to find out…
The Apps
In most cases, students opted to solve a problem that they had faced themselves. This was immediately apparent from the first app, GIF-T, which turns a bevy of related photos into a short montage video and wraps it up with a (virtual!) bow and gift tag. When we asked about the inspiration for their app, the developers stated that they had grown tired of receiving hundreds of similar photos from weddings, birthdays, or particularly infamous trips to their local pub. Powered by the image-to-video conversions provided by the Zamzar API, the developers of GIF-T were able to build a simple prototype and wireframes for their final application in just a few hours.
Three of the applications focused on making file conversion extremely straightforward for everyone. These included a Dropbox plug-in which allowed “hot folders” to be used for automatically converting files from one format to another, a browser plug-in for converting archive files from unusual formats (we’re looking at you WinRAR) to something more commonplace, and a UNIX command for converting files as part of a shell script.
Meanwhile, a trio of students experimented with combining file conversion with natural language processing in their automated illustrator app. The goal here was to analyse a story (in plaintext), use an image search engine to select appropriate illustrations for the story, and combine the end result into an eBook using the Zamzar API. The developers demonstrated their application using Alice in Wonderland as a source text.
The final app was the excellent and bewildering Cat Meme Generator, which combined Web 3.o design sensibilities with the ability to generate cat-related memes. We’re not quite sure why this app exists, but we’re glad that it does.
The Winners
Although we were thoroughly impressed with everybody’s efforts, we awarded prizes to our favourite three apps:
- Automatic file conversion with Dropbox (Michael Walsh)
- EasyCompress for automatically converting archive files (Joe Anderson)
- Automatic story illustrator (Liam Mullane, Liviu Pirvan and Calub Tan)
The plucky winners took home prizes, and we came away thoroughly impressed with how much can be achieved with a few hours work. We’ll be releasing the source code from some of these applications in the coming days on our GitHub repo so you can extend and reuse the code in your own applications.
