Hackathon Results and August News
Hey Thunkers 👋
We’ve got lots of exciting news for you this month including; the winners of our Summer Hackathon, some great new Thunkable features, and new apps for you to try every week.
Summer Hackathon Results
Huge thanks to everyone who took part in our Summer Hackathon. In June we challenged Thunkers to create an app for small businesses who are affected by the current pandemic.
We received entries from all over the world, with wonderful ideas to help local enterprises. The standard was really high, which made the decision extra difficult, but we’re delighted to share with you our winner and runner-up.
Winner: Customer Counter by Eoin Parkinson
Customer Counter was created to provide brick-and-mortar businesses with free social distancing tools for customers and employees. This cloud-based solution provides intelligent insights into store performance, visitor numbers, group sizes, busiest hours, and more.
You can keep up to date with the latest news from the Customer Counter team over on Twitter @CustomerCounter
Runner Up: Your Voice App by Sofía Galán
Your Voice App is a communication tool for non-profit businesses. They can post for help or look for help available. It is meant to serve as a closed-community app where people in remote areas can connect with NGOs that can help them. Once you log in with your phone number, you can offer help or contact any help available. The content is curated by the community for the community.
Technovation 2020
Special shout-out to Rachel, Joy, Margaret and their mentor Evelyn who were awarded the top prize at Technovation this year. Their app “Memory Haven” is designed to help families who have been impacted by dementia.
We’re delighted that so many teams, including team “Memory Haven”, choose Thunkable for their Technovation projects each year.
Check out technovation.org if you’re interested in taking part in 2021.
What We’ve Been Building
API 29 for Android
Android apps built with Thunkable are now fully compatible with API 29. If you’ve been waiting to publish your app in the Play Store then now is the time to do it.
New Web Viewer Blocks
The Web Viewer component has been improved with two new functions. Navigating back and forward between web pages is a breeze with these new blocks.
Canvas Scaling Properties
We’ve updated the Canvas component so you can now make the Stage scale — great for gaming on different screen sizes.
What We’ve Been Reading
Elsewhere on Medium, Aleksandra Walczak has written about her experiences using Thunkable as a UX Designer. We loved reading about how the design evolved over the duration of the project. Aleksandra also has some great tips on scalable designs:
“When your components scale, make sure they scale the way you want them to and your design is accessible on different screen sizes. You can open a preview in a browser and change the device size using developer tools.”
