Dine-O

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  Home page

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  Profile Page

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  Intake Page

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  Dine-O Shop

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this app is unhealthy eating habits of students, including ourselves. Most students, high school and university, have sacrificed some healthy eating habits in order to keep up with their studies; we believe that this is unnecessary, and more importantly, very unhealthy in the long run. When students are given a fun and engaging app with a unique reward system we are almost certain that this sacrifice can be avoided. Teenagers and young adults sometimes feel more obligated to take care of another being than they do themselves and we will put that to its best use. A key feature of this app is that it is lacking a calorie counter and this is done on purpose. When calories are tracked it can bring on feelings of anxiety and stress about food and we want to do the opposite of that. We want healthy eating to be stress free and easy and that is why we designed this app.

What it does

Dine-O is a one of a kind food tracking app. On Dine-O your goal is to reach a certain number of servings for each food group as well as water. Dine-O doesn’t care that much whether you eat an apple or a banana or if you eat yogurt or cheese, Dine-O just wants to make sure you're eating in a way that will make you and your body feel good. Whenever you eat, you have your own little pet dinosaur who eats too. This is done as an incentivization tool, in order to encourage healthy eating not just for yourself but for your new friend. Once you reach your intake goals, you will earn some Dine-O dollars which can be used in the shop to customize your pet Dine-O with hats. Overall Dine-O takes a completely different approach to food tracking and is geared towards those who just want to eat a little healthier, not those who need to log every single gram of protein.

How we built it

Since none of us had proficient enough coding knowledge to commit to fully coding our project, we tried our luck with Figma since it seemed relatively intuitive compared to Java, for example. We did our best using Processing but we ended up too frustrated, to be honest. By making an app prototype on Figma and taking advantage of the animation features, we were able to come up with a draft of our app design. The drawings were all hand drawn by us with an iPad.

Challenges we ran into

Having little coding background and us being Hackathon newbies, we were a little overwhelmed with where to even start in the beginning. Also, we didn’t really know how much our ideas would be limited by our ability to actually execute them: would we actually be able to code/produce our idea? Another big problem we had was making the most of our time. It was difficult to make sure we were on top of things because there wasn’t much time to begin with. We did not face any issues that we were unable to get around which we are very proud of.  

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having the tiny coding experience we had, we are very proud that we even came up with something. We are also very proud of how we persevered through this weekend. It was very easy to look around and see all these complicated projects around ours and feel like we didn’t belong, but we stayed determined to learn something and that carried us through. Although we felt out of place, we knew that you aren’t naturally good at something and that coding isn’t really intuitive and it takes practice, which is what we did this weekend. We tried different techniques and we came out of this hackathon with lots of learned experience which is what counts. 

What we learned

What we learned is that it is okay to change your plan. We went into this hackathon thinking we were going to come out with a fully working, 100% coded, polished product. That did not happen. We changed our plan so many times along the way and that is okay. Yes, in an ideal world you should come up with a plan and stick with it but hackathons are not ideal worlds. If your plan isn’t working, move on to the next step, because in the end the goal is to create something. The thing you create doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be pretty (even though ours is) but it does have to be something that you put time and effort into creating and that is what we did. We built a project that we are all passionate about and believe that, with the right tools, would be an app that people would want and use. 

What's next for Dine-O

We see a big future for Dine-O. Once our coding skills begin to catch up with our ambition we would like to make Dine-O available in the app store for anyone to download for free. At its core, Dine-O is an app designed to keep people healthy and we believe that everyone should be able to access an app like that. It's very easy to keep up with, and it is not punitive or shameful like other meal apps. We also believe that Dine-O could also be targeted towards demographics other than students. A large demographic that we believe would appreciate Dine-O is those recovering from eating disorders, with its lack of a calorie counter and primary focus on eating enough to keep your body healthy, it would be an ideal app for this market. Whether or not Dine-O ends up in the app store we hope that people who see this idea understand how important it is to eat healthy, even when you have a major exam to study for.

Built With

• figma