Making Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change with Patrick Weaver: A Glitch Creator Profile, Glitch
Creative coders, designers, artists, activists, and educators are all building the apps of their dreams on Glitch. In this post, we showcase apps made by web developer Patrick Weaver!
By day, he helps young people learn to code, but by night, he creates hit apps that have been used by thousands of people. As Learning Design Manager at Mouse, Patrick works on projects and curriculum that empowers students to create technology that solves real problems and make meaningful change.
He has a long history of working with and creating educational material for kids. This includes writing and illustrating a series of children’s books — like “The Ungrumblies”, a book about allergies — as well as others about adventures in and around New York City.
His apps on Glitch range from functional tools to fun, creative games and experiments.
Let’s take a look at some of his projects:
Beachcomber
A colorful Minesweeper-clone made with React. You are a beachcomber on the hunt for treasure. You can dig to try to find some hints, but don’t reveal the treasure now while the beach is full!
Emoji Wallpaper
A simple app that generates your own emoji wallpaper! Add any emojis you want to make a custom emoji wallpaper for your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.
Record Player
From Spotify playlist generators to Stranger Things tributes — audio apps are always a hit on Glitch. Music is perhaps the industry that has been most transformed by technology, and it’s created a nearly insatiable appetite for ways to augment your listening experience with technology.
This is proven out by the popularity of Patrick’s Record Player app. Like a Rube Goldberg machine for music, he linked the output of the Google Cloud Vision API with Spotify’s Search API to find music based on an uploaded image of an album’s cover art. Dubbed “Shazam for album covers” by Pitchfork, his app was covered by both music and culture outlets like NME and Paste as well as tech press.
Much like Google’s Art and Culture app, Record Player is given a new dimension with selfies. By uploading a pic of yourself you can see which album Spotify thinks you look like most. So perhaps “Shazam for your face” is a better description! 😙🤳🏾
Apps for Good
Patrick’s work typifies the positive impact apps and technology can have on people’s lives. Record Player is not just a fun mashup of APIs, but an app that bridges the gap from useful tool — like identifying an album overheard in a busy record store — to a fun way to pass the time when hanging out with friends, such as seeing whose selfie results in the best or most obscure song.
Patrick’s day job at Mouse<<mouse.org>>, a national youth development nonprofit, helps create more diversity in STEM and opens up opportunities for students from under-served communities across the US.
You can learn more about Patrick on his website, follow him on Twitter, and see what he creates next on his Glitch profile.
