Dropbox at HackZurich: Four Projects Worth a Second Look
Dropbox's platform team spent last weekend at HackZurich, Europe's largest student hackathon, with more than 450 participants from dozens of countries. The event gave us a chance to meet new developers and watch them build against our API, and four teams in particular caught our attention.
Stitch: Best in Show
Stitch tackles a familiar pain point: when several people present in sequence, the audience has to juggle multiple files. The app collects PowerPoints or PDFs from different contributors and merges them into a single presentation. Users can also share the resulting links through Dropbox, giving conference attendees access to the presentation materials. The team came up with the concept during the opening ceremonies, and their solution won the Best Use of the Dropbox API category, earning each member a pair of Beats headphones and 5GB of Dropbox space. Their source code is on GitHub.
MyCloset: A Digital Wardrobe
MyCloset brings the futuristic closet-swipe scene from Clueless to life. The app pulls clothing items — tops, bottoms, and eventually accessories — from Zalando's API and lets users swipe through combinations. Because Zalando product images disappear once items are no longer for sale, the team built the app to store a permanent personal wardrobe in Dropbox using the v2 HTTP API in an iPhone app. The team members know each other from work and prior hackathons and settled on the digital closet after brainstorming late into Friday night. Their project code is available on GitHub.
Wunderbox: A Digital Surprise Bag
Germans will recognize the wundertüte — the mystery candy bag sold at grocery stores. Wunderbox is the digital equivalent. After linking a Dropbox account, users receive a folder filled with funny gifs, music, pictures, and other surprise content in place of candy. There's also an option to send a surprise to a friend. Notably, Wunderbox was the team's second project of the weekend and took about eight hours to complete, and it boasted some of the best design we saw all event. The creators plan to add paid content as the next feature.
SplitBox.me: Encryption Across Cloud Storage
SplitBox encrypts files and distributes them across multiple cloud storage accounts, with Dropbox as one of the supported locations. Users can share files with others via encrypted passwords. By the end of the hackathon, the app included substantial cryptography features, integrated several different APIs, and kept the interface simple and streamlined. The team behind SplitBox are students at Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam who have worked on other projects together. They say the app is ready to use now, with some refactoring planned before additional features are added.
The HackZurich weekend was a busy one for our team: Eric delivered a tech talk on our APIs, Leah served on the main judging panel, and Alex and Jenn fielded questions ranging from OAuth to JavaScript. It was also the first event we've attended since launching the v2 of our developer site. With over 120 teams competing, only 25 were selected as finalists to present in the closing ceremonies. Congratulations to all participants.
