Alicia Sykes's Blog

Apps World 2014 in London was great this year, with over 1,600 attendees it was held at the ExCel, and had loads of good speakers and sponsors.

My favourite talks from day 2 were: first a talk titled responsive website or native app which was given by Geoff Parkhurst who's the CTO of Lovehoney, he weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each side very nicely. This I found particularly interesting since it's relevant to work at the moment.

Another great talk was given by Grant Allen from Google, on extreme wearables. This image (sorry for the bad quality photo) actually shows something really cool. the axis on the left is the % of people who are awake, the axis on the bottom is the time of night. As you can see, between 10pm and 1am, the % of people awake falls, since they've gone to bed, however at 3:30 AM, it suddenly rises, this was due to a huge earth quake that night. Each different coloured line is a different city, and this data could potentially be used to give a short warning to an earth quake to people in further away cities. This particular data came from JawBone, but any basic activity tracker would have recorded similar results, and would have the scope to implement this.

I also attended several other very interesting talks seen  here

Introduction

Any student will know that mobile phones are a massive distraction to studying, but also have some utilities that help you get your work done, such as calculator or Wikipedia. This weekend I developed an application that aims to reduce the distractions cause by your Android device.

The interface is simple, you enter the amount of time you need to stay focused for, and press start. Study mode will mute all notifications and disable home and back buttons. It's not immediately easy to get out of the app once your in study mode, though you do still have access to core features such as emergency dialer, time...  Once the timer reaches zero you once again have full access to your phone.

Technical Details

Links

Screen Shots

Start Screen

Timer Screen

Additional Views