Tomer Shemesh

ParkPassport

Release Date: May 2019

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ParkPassport is a mobile app made for users to easily find parks near them, and keep track of parks they have been to.
For this project I was contracted by the National Park Service to develop a native Android and iOS app, as well as a backend API and web admin dashboard. In addition to finding and tracking parks, the app allows you to add friends and see the parks they have been to, upload photos of the parks, log activities, and virtually visit certain national parks using google earth.
This service shows all official parks and landmarks recognized the National Park Service, as well as most local parks in the US provided by the free ArcGIS Park API. The ArcGIS API allows the app to download detailed gps park boundaries for automatically detecting and logging park visits via the phones location.

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ON/AORE Campus Challenge

Release Date: August 2016

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The Campus Challenge is a competition that happens once a year between many colleges and universities across the country, and the goal is to get as many people outside and active as possible.
Administration and students from the school sign up and endorse the competition, and students/faculty register under that school to participate. Each user is then tasked with uploading up to 5 photos a day of them doing activities to get points. Different activities are worth different amounts, and the schools and users that ends up with the most points after 2 months gets rewarded with outdoor gear and sponsorship money for the schools outdoors club.
During the competitions, we got to run partnerships with many prominent outdoor brands such as REI, Hydroflask, Northface, Adidas, etc, and had brand specific bonuses for extra points and giveaways.
Originally, this competition did not have a mobile app and the website was run by a third party. In my spare time, I made a mobile app to allow Drexel students to submit to the competition directly from their phone (See Philly Activity Poster). After seeing my work, I was hired to write the official Android app and iOS for the competition, as well as rewrite the entire backend from scratch. Over the years I have help run the competition multiple times with hundreds of schools and thousands of users.
The competition was originally run by Outdoor Nation/Foundation (ON), and in 2019 was transferred to The Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education (AORE)
In fall 2020 the competition was suspended and the apps/website were taken down because of COVID19, and has been on hold since.

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MC Status Minecraft Widget

Release Date: July 2018

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MC Status in a Mac and iPhone app i've written and open sourced in my spare time to solve a silly issue I had in my life. Normally when playing online games like Minecraft, in order to check if one of your friends is playing, you would have to start up your computer, open the game, and load up the server in order to see if anyone was online.
This solves that problem by allowing you to add servers you want to track in your app, and then you can place widgets on your homescreen, allowing you to quickly tell if anyone is online. This app was also written using Swift and Mac Catalyst, which meant that the app is available for both iPhones and Mac. The app is used by ~1500 unique monthly active users and has 4.6 stars with over 400 ratings on the iPhone store globally.

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Improv Everywhere Android App

Release Date: June 2015

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Improv Everywhere is a comedy collective that stages unexpected performances in public places. I had participated in some of their events and enjoyed their content, but noticed they only had an iPhone app. I decided to reach out and offered to write an Android app for them to pair with the iOS app they had, and they agreed.
The Android app allows you to view the group's content & videos, connect with the group on social media, and participate in events.
Mainly, the app allowed for users to participate in the group's famous 'MP3 Experiments'. These events had thousands of people show up at a predefined place with a list of items. Everyone would open the app at a specific time, and the app would sync the audio across all the devices to allow everyone to listen to the instructions at the same time.
In 2017 the backend service for this app was taken down, and so these versions of the apps were taken off the AppStore.

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YapTap Android App

Release Date: April 2015

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YapTap was an app made by a company named 'Who Went Out Inc.', The company already had an iOS app, and I was contracted to write an Android app to pair with it.
The concept behind YapTap was mainly 'Snapchat for Audio'. It allowed you to record voice messages, or pick up to 30 seconds from a Spotify song and send it to other users with a message. This allowed friends to communicate only using audio snippets, similar to how iMessage lets you send voice memos today. Additionally, this app integrated with Spotify and allowed you to open the songs sent to you directly in the Spotify app.
In 2017 the company decided to move on to other ventures and removed YapTap from the AppStore.

iOS Jailbreak Tweaks

Release Dates: August 2018 - 2021

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iPhones and the software that runs on them are generally thought to be pretty secure, but there is a well established group of people who are dedicated to jailbreaking and modifying iPhones. On jailbroken phones, there is a custom store added that allows you to download packages that change the way the OS runs that you normally don't have access to.
After being annoyed that I didn't have more control around certain aspects of how my phone worked, I became interested in creating custom open source jailbreak packages, and published them to the official jailbreak store, all of which now have thousands of downloads.

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NotiBlock

(Pictured) NotiBlock is a tweak I made that adds a custom page in your phone settings app that allows you much more strict control over push notifications. It allows you to block or mute push notifications based on a combination of filters, including: the app that sent it, the notification content, and the notification day/time.
This lets me do things like automatically mute work emails on weekends, schedule specific times only certain people can reach me, and block notifications from apps which might send annoying notifications or ads. This tweak was also written about and praised by iDownloadBlog, a well known apple and jailbreak news website.

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Search for Clubhouse

This is a tweak I wrote that adds functionality to official Clubhouse app. Clubhouse is an app that lets you join voice chats with people all over the world. Unfortunately though, by default the app shows you a huge list of all rooms with no way to filter them. This tweak injects into the app and adds a search bar to the top, allowing you to search for voice chats or events by specific topics and names.

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Push For Apollo

Reddit is a online forumn for people to talk about any topic. The official Reddit app works ok, but many people prefer to use other third party Reddit clients. One downside of this though is that only Reddit's apps officially support push notifications because they don't provide an API for this to the public. This tweak is one I made that allows you to install both the official Reddit app, and a third party client. Then when the official Reddit app gets a push notification, this tweak swaps some values around, so it becomes a notification from your third party app.

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TapTap to Skip

Many people including myself really enjoying the YouTube app feature where you can double tap on the left or right side of your screen while playing a video to skip forward or backward. I really wanted this to work in other apps, but most didn't support it. This caused me to write a tweak which added the double tap to skip, as well as being able to play/pause by force touching the screen to many apps including Netflix, Prime Video, CrunchyRoll, and HBO-Go.

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Philly Activity Poster

Release Date: September 2015

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Before being contracted to work on the official Campus Challenge app, I wrote my own, which allowed students at Drexel to post in the Campus Challenge directly using my app. It was written for both Android & iOS and used HTML parsing to interact with the website in the background while users saw the app frontend. It helped Drexel place higher than we normally would have in the competition and is the reason I was hired to make the official apps the next year.
Once the official campus challenge apps were published, these were taken off the store.

Mr.Chunker Apps

Release Date: December 2016

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Mr.Chunker is a fishing companion for those who do overnight chunking trips. The device takes the place of a person and slowly dispenses bait from a container over time to attract fish. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy to configure it, and I contracted to write an Android & iOS app that easily lets a user set up and control the device. It lets you do things like set the chunk speed, set up the button functionality, calibrate it, and more.

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Drexel GPA Calculator

Release Date: June 2013

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This was the first app I ever wrote and was my entry into the mobile app world. Written for Android & iOS, this app was made for Drexel students to help predict how their GPA will be affected by certain grades. It integrated with Drexel One using HTML scraping to allow users to login and download their class grades into the app automatically, and then search through the classes offered by Drexel and select what grades they thought they would get. This app would then show you what your new GPA would be, along with graphs showing your Term and Cumulative GPA.
In 2018, Drexel changed how their website works and these apps stopped working correctly, so I took them off the store.

WiMap Hackathon Project

Release Date: April 2017

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WiMap was a hackathon project I worked on with a group that took 1st place in DragonHacks 2017 in both the over all competition, and Lockheed Martin's Best Complex Data Visualization Tool. This app was written in just 48 hours, and allows you to analyze your WiFi by walking around your home and generating a WiFi strength heat map. This lets you see where the WiFi weak spots are in your house, and offers an option to analyze the heat map and suggest a new router placement that might get better WiFi coverage.

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Multi-Sensored QuadFusion Hackathon Project

Release Date: January 2015

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Multi-Sensored QuadFusion was a hackathon project I worked on that took first place at DragonHacks 2015. I worked with a group creating an interface that allows anyone to control a drone just by looking around and pointing. The project used a Google Glass and its built-in camera to run OpenCV and detect bright stickers on the drone. It then sent commands to the drone using an Intel Edison board over WiFi to instruct the drone to move to the user's center of view. Additionally, the system connected to a Myo armband over Bluetooth, and allowed you to make the drone fly closer or farther from you based on your arm position.

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KDYL Airport model for MSFS

Release Date: September 2020

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One of my hobbies besides programming is Flight Simulators and 3D design. In 2020, Microsoft released a new Flight Sim that is the most realistic to date, and includes airports from around the world. Additionally, they released an SDK to allow people to create models for airports that are missing and share them with the community, to attempt to make a 'Digital Twin' of the entire world. My contribution to this project was handcrafting the Doylestown airport, a small single runway airport mostly used for pilot training near me. It includes extremely accurate runways, taxiways, paint markings, lighting, buildings, hangars, parking spots, and textures. It's a great representation and a good way to practice flying laps and doing procedures before the real thing.

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Flight Simulator Hardware

Release Date: June 2020

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In addition to making 3D models for flight simulators, I like to make custom hardware interfaces too, which allow me to control the flight sim with physical hardware. Most of the hardware panels you find online is extremely expensive though, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. This was the main reason I decided to see if I could enhance my flight simulator experience with some homemade tech. For this project, I used an Arduino, which detects the user input and controls the LED display inside a custom designed 3D printed housing. It then communicates over USB with a custom flight sim plugin I made, which lets you control the planes in the sim via the physical panels.

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Thingiverse 3D Designs

Release Date: June 2019 - Present

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In my spare time, I also like to experiment with 3D printing and 3D modeling. 3D printing is great for making custom brackets, adapters, housings, and figures. When I make something I find useful, I usually upload it to Thingiverse so others who are interested can try printing it themselves, or modify it into their own creation.

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Alexa Smart TV

Release Date: November 2017

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This project was based around the time I bought a brand new Samsung Smart TV and then realized it didn't come with voice control. I took this as a challenge to built a software package and Alexa skill that uses a Raspberry Pi as an MQTT hub. This lets it be the bridge that can hear commands from Alexa, and then send them to your Samsung TV over websockets. I published this skill and the source code on the Alexa skill store to allow anyone with a Raspberry Pi and Samsung TV to easily set this up themselves.

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Reverse Engineering Drexel One's API

Release Date: December 2016

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Drexel University offers an official mobile app to their students which uses a private API that fetches data like grades, class schedule, meal plan, etc. Unfortunately, they don't make it available to students, so I spent some time reverse engineering it and seeing how it worked so I could use it for some personal projects. I used Charles Proxy with a custom TLS root certificate on my phone to run a MITM attack on the app and inspect the traffic, and then decompiled the Android app to reverse engineer how they generated the unique request authentication hash.

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Mobile App Security Talk

Release Date: April 2019

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While working for Lutron Electronics, I got an opportunity to go give a talk about mobile app security at Drexel University. I gave an overview into the most common ways people bypass app security and ways to protect yourself. Additionally, I provided a vulnerable android app to the people who attended the talk, with the promise that whoever could bypass the login screen first would win a free Lutron Switch. This talk goes over topics such as network request interception, app decompilation, runtime memory manipulation, and method swizzling, and is now shown to all new app developers at Lutron.

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GitHub

Release Date: January 2016 - Present

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GitHub and the open-source community is, in my opinion, one of the greatest achievements of mankind. A single location that contains code snippets and examples for every language, project, and API known. GitHub is one of the main resources I use to learn how things work throughout my programming career. I feel strongly about giving back and open sourcing as much of my work as I can, because I know many people will be able to take what I have done and build upon it to make something even greater.

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