I, too, was a hacker there. PennApps this year was definitely a great time, but the judging didn't really align well with the quality of apps. One of the most popular apps, PayTango, had a completely faked demo from what I saw (I saw the play button show up when they tapped a button on the iPad, revealing that it was just an image slideshow of mockups). That and the demo time was severely truncated, 75 seconds is enough to demo about one feature, and when your app has several features it's impossible to show it all.
The press didn't even cover some of the coolest hacks in my opinion, like http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com , http://bbcat.co , http://electioneering.us , and http://notableapp.herokuapp.com , and some more I can't recall.
I understand that it's hard for them to deal with so many participants though (it was may more than they had planned), so I applaud them for their effort and expect them to improve their plans accordingly for the spring event, which will definitely be just as popular if not more-so.
I definitely felt like the judging was rushed; given the pinch on time, I liked a lot of their choices though. Do you know if J.A.M. actually even worked? I really liked where they were going, but it didn't look like the app actually worked even close to as well as the other music transcribers out there, so I was pretty surprised when they won. Although I definitely thought they were moving in a cool direction, I don't know how the judges could tell if their app actually worked or not at all.
haha I decompiled their jar the other day actually, and they basically just combined abc4j with the YIN method of finding fundamental frequency for sound and, a table between frequencies and notes. I doubt it works nearly as well as most alternatives, because they made no provisions for noise in the signal or other complications. Very simple implementation even by hackathon standards, but it was presented like magic so I'm not surprised they wowed the judges. One of the team members even said this though "We just used Java, which is really basic programing. We didn’t even use fancy web app stuff, which is why we didn’t expect this at all. I don’t even know what to say about this" -theDP
