Yesterday was the first Rusic Hackday. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The skills that we saw blew our minds, with themes being created that we did even think were possible.

The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

And the entries were:

In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

@iamkeir – Rusicursive

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to :) Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

@daleanthony - Best Recipes

Lovely design and use of Masonry

A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

@jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

I want that breakfast

Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

@tholder – Mountain biking locations

Lovely Google map integration

A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

@adambu1988 – 360k

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

 @jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

Liking of Comments.

These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

@scottifydotcom – FootoFan

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

@benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

The lovely action hover bar

A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. :) Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

And the winners were:

Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

Best Idea - 360k

We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the  closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. ;) So instead:

Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.