During the quackhack weekend, our group was tasked at creating a ‘Danny Finder’, the exact purpose of the product was known; create a web app to track Danny and other people when they waddle around.

Our team consisted of Danny, Calum, Raj and Clement and we kicked off at 11am. We kicked off the hackathon with no prior discussions, research or planning besides an outline of an idea.

The original brief from our presentation

We all agreed that the calendar itself is not good enough at tracking people and the issue isn’t only with Danny. Sometimes an unexpected delay, transport problem or prolonged meeting makes us quack in hysteria despairing at where our fellow duck is.  Having a more visual interface to track where colleagues are would be useful. Google Latitude used to be able to do this but since its been discontinued we need a better way to hunt and visuliase where our flock is.

Our approach entailed a 2-hour research brain dump where each of us looked at different tools cursing why Google made Latitude obsolete and whether Google Plus provides location data that is accessible via an API. After looking at Fouresquare, Geoloqi and some other frameworks, we decided that Openpaths fit the bill.

Openpaths is a good alternative to Google Latitude

Calum and Danny immediately tested its capabilities by driving up the road to Radlett (the neighbouring upmarket town) while Clement and Raj observed their movements on the screen.

Calum and Danny driving from Elstree, Borehamwood to Radlett

Openpaths is a project backed by the New York Times and it seemed like a wise choice for a number of reasons:

It provides native iOS and Android apps that run in the background and it doesn’t waste battery life

There is an API based on OAuth that provides a token and access key to any web possible web interface

It supports multiple users

The security and encryption are very high

After agreeing on the Openpaths framework (1.5 hours into the hackathon), we started drawing up business use cases, which entailed a list of utilities. This included a web login screen so any smartphone user can view where colleagues are located, a way to visualize the staff (name, last location and time) and how we will pull in their photo using Gravatar. We also discussed how we could tag our London office and even fellow duck’s homes so we can see that ‘Danny is at home’.

The team were planning the use cases in a simple word document