TartanHacks - TwitterQuizzer

This is a bit delayed, but roughly a month ago I attended a ~1 day Hackathon at Carnegie Mellon called 'TartanHacks" (Feb 6-7). The application my team of three created a simple web app game where people could quiz themselves on how well they knew their friends on twitter. A tweet would be shown to the player and the player then had to guess who it came from.

 

Once the game was over, the player could tweet the score to share.

I was playing as someone else and obviously my score reflects that

My personal goal for this project was presenting a simple interface while experimenting with CSS3 animations. You can't see here, but the heart on the starting screen dips up and down and for each round, the 'card' shows a tweet and flips over to show the answer. This is technically a one page application with parts coming in and out via AJAX, so all transitions also use CSS animations in tandem with javascript. I also got my first real taste of twitter Bootstrap.

In other words, my goal was to create an interface that could easily be understood by anyone, and to accomplish that I went for a simple interface bolstered with animations to make it a seamless experience. Of course there were some issues with this project. Our app interacted with the Twitter API, and we quickly hit the call limit. One way of solving this is creating multiple accounts (each with their own quota). Another issue was that multimedia was returned as a reduced twitter link, and it was difficult to sense what type of media was ultimately returned. An image? A link to soundcloud? A youtube video? In a perfect world, the game would show said media, and we attempted to do this by using a built in twitter embed iframe. But the iframe came with the source user by default, and attempts to obfuscate or remove the name proved frustrating. So for now it simply displays the link.

Regardless, this proved to be a fun and learning experience, and I'm happy with how the application presents itself. Shoutout to Aditi Sarkar and Sangha Lee for being a great team!

Repo link: Coming soon