June Devshop London: Lookback, the multi-device web, and more

By Oli Evans

The demo-fest that is Devshop London rises again! This month’s roster of wonderment was:

Lookback — Carl Littke

Lookback­ just landed a chunk of funding and the super Carl Littke, founder and lead developer, swooped in from Sweden to show’n’tell how they’ve used Meteor and a custom native SDK to capture every tap, swipe and facial expression of your iOS app’s user experience.

It’s an amazing product and Carl walked us through the implementation details, from its infinite-scroll via subscription limiting, to judicious use of undocumented APIs to store a user’s selection state on a shared Collection without syncing it to the server… followed by an in-depth Q&A session. Check out the video!

A conceptual future for the multi-device web — Ben Foxall

This talk was a JavaScript adventure into the possibilities of multi-device interfaces.

Anyone who’s been to a Devshop London knows we love dangerously demo-heavy talks, and Ben’s is more of a performance on what’s possible when we have a handful of connected devices at our disposal.

Highlights included a deceptively simple canvas drawing demo that morphs into a real-time graph of multi-transport latency, and manipulating images in 3D using swipe gestures from multiple devices.

The comments afterwards summed it up:

“The definition of inspiring”

“Superbe! Mind Blowed!!!!”

Lightning Talks

@MeteoriteP by Richard Silverton — https://github.com/richsilv/meteoritetweeter

A Meteor package tweet-bot, built on Meteor! Despite insisting he’s not a developer, Richard showed us how simple it is to connect to a remote Meteor-powered DDP endpoint and build new apps on top of them.

Orfeo by Simon Katan — https://github.com/kimon-satan/orfeo

Simon showed us a work-in-progress demo of an interactive art project to translate the classic text adventure ZORK into an interactive audio play.

itinera.re by Tom Sabin — ­https://github.com/tomsabin/itinerary

Itinera.re is a super-slick minimalist itinerary tool, for planning a grand day out, collating cats, and everything in between.

Midi Hack! by Jon Gold — https://github.com/jongd/MIDIHack

Jon Gold demoed a multi-player audio bop-it game, using Meteor to expose the bleeps of Ableton Live to the assembled-audience orchestra.

Abstact animations prompted the players to affect the audio by making a similar physical gesture with their handset. The changes in the accelerometer data are mapped to the multitude of Ableton audio parameters, and depsite the UI being all in Swedish and no one having any idea what was going on, the result was a real-time audio jamboree.

Photos by Tim Marrinan