Out of Hand

Out of Hand are a print design and distribution company based in Bristol, who also organise all the posters and flyering for Edinburgh festival.

Previously, to prove to show organisers that posters had been distributed around the city, Out of Hand fitters had had to take pictures of each poster and then record the location and associated information in huge spreadsheets. This current method was unfortunately unmaintainable and unsecure.

Gravitywell were tasked with the creation of an app for Android and iOS that would allow the fitters to capture images of the posters in situ. The images are then geocoded and sent to a backend where the show organisers can see and monitor where their posters are located.

With the newly built apps, the fitter can now take a picture of the newly fitted poster and the app will send the image to the image recognition service, moodstocks. If the image matches a poster in the moodstock catalog, it will then return the filename of the image. 

The filename is then made up the metadata for the image, and this data would then send to the backend where the data was stored.

Both the iOS and Android apps have a shared codebase, thanks to the amazing React Native Framework. What this means is that most of the development only needs to be done once, which saves a huge amount of time in the initial build and when it comes to making changes and adding features later on.

Gravitywell built the backend in node using the Meteor framework, which is perfect for fast browser-based applications. The backend stores information sent from the apps allowing the show hosts to lookup the location of the posters around the city.