HackMeUp #10

Andrzej Tucholka Lead Code Architect

Last Friday, we’ve had another HackMeUp event in Tuenti. During the day we’ve had our Engineers twisting their minds around a lot of projects which included (ordered by number of votes). When looking at awesomeness of those, have in mind that all of those projects are one day stunts!

• WINNER – Nearby places on mobile – see description below
• Flickr integration – integrating your tuenti albums with flickr, allowing to view photos from flickr through Tuenti.
• Grouping friends – implementing the management of groups of your friends and integration with some of the common actions you could do on Tuenti.
• Radio player – use Tuenti player as an internet radio client handling radio playlists and with different types of visualization.
• Strawberry Jam – an integration of our internal tool (Marmite) with CruiseControl allowing to automatically detect who and when broke a unit test.
• Amazing extension/Share on Tuenti – Chrome extension transforming the way Tuenti is displayed and make uploads of pictures from the internet much easier
• CSV Importer – import your data, contacts into Tuenti from a portable format handled by many popular sites like LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
• URL Shortener – a Tuenti service for shortening URLs
• ChromedTuenti – Chrome extension allowing easy single and mass uplaods to Tuenti along with the ability to instantaneously share URLs via your status
• Places/Emots – Tweaks to Places service and emoticons list for the chat

And a note from the winners:

Jorge J. Barroso Carmona Mobile Applications Developer
Miguel Lara Encabo Senior Mobile Engineer

We decided to play around with one of the new features available in the social network –Tuenti Sitios– and more specifically finding out places close to your location.

As it was a quick one day project we focused on developing this feature for iPhone and Android, facing in each platform the challenges of tracing the location of the device, following its orientation and displaying an overlay with the places on top of a camera view. We went for the simplest approach possible: projecting the place on a circular strip parallel to the ground. We though about using sphere projections similar to those on OpenGL, but we decided it was too much of an overkill.

By projecting on a 2D wrapped-around strip we simplify the process of positioning the place to just finding out the angle ∂, based on the longitude and latitude of both the device (O) and the place (P). Once ∂ is determined, knowing the orientation of the device is enough to project it on the strip.

And few additional photos from the event.