Cat Got Your Computer

Inspiration

As computer science majors, we unanimously felt that the hours spent obsessively staring at screens and raging over a bunch of 0s and 1s was not the healthiest ways to live. We figured that the best way to focus on our mental health was by actually getting off technology, but since this isn't exactly possible in this day and age, we decided to remake a time-tested classic application that tracks your screen-time, but with a twist.

What it does

Cat Got Your Computer gives you a personal pal named Kitty who follows you around constantly. While he looks like he's sleeping, he's actually judging you and making sure you only spend a certain amount of time on time-wasting websites. You get awarded points based on how little negative screen time you have and these points can be used to help Kitty live a luxurious life.

How we built it

We used Google Chrome's API alongside HTML and Javascript to make an interactive popup user interface and moveable gif that appeared directly on the users' screen.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of problems with reference code that was from a previous version of Google Chrome, which made it difficult for us to recreate many parts of our vision like the ability to find and store the total amount of time the user spent on certain sites. In addition, we had issues with using JQuery, which is what we were most comfortable with coding in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of everything we were able to accomplish with this project. We came in not knowing anything about Chrome extension development and with very little experience with HTML and JavaScript (we're both currently taking UI and have only recently started covering JQuery), so the fact that we were able to get any of this up and running was amazing.

What we learned

We learned so much and gained a lot of technical skills. Although it wasn't for long, we were able to put our problem-solving abilities to the test and learn how to adapt to failures.

What's next for Cat Got Your Computer

We want to figure out how to get the home screen to update its static pngs when someone buys something from the store and equips it. We also are hoping to officially get the point system up and running once we can store the correct running total time on a given site. We also really want to be able to implement the "angry kitty" that will rapidly move around the users' screen to forcefully obstruct them from spending more time on a site, and eventually allow a competition aspect on leaderboards and with friends for further incentives.