Doggoscopes

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by team member Corie's yellow lab puppy, Colby (aka "Cheesedog"). We wanted to attempt something simple (how young we were at the beginning of this hackathon) and fun for our first hackathon, and a very small Android app seemed doable. The idea of horoscopes for dogs came out of brainstorming dog versions of non-dog things. You could say we were aiming at the Best Humor Hack category and you would be correct.

What it does

The app asks a user to select their dog’s birthdate and then shows a graphic of the dog’s zodiac sign and a dog-centric horoscope.

How we built it

We used the Basic template in Android Studio as a starting point. All images were custom-created in Microsoft Paint.

Challenges we ran into

We both have very little coding experience and even less artistic skill. What programming experience we do have is mostly in python. It took most of the first day for us to get all necessary programs downloaded and running, and getting the emulator to function was particularly frustrating. We initially wanted to use one fragment as the title screen and a second fragment as the result page, where a user would input a date on the title screen and the result page would show an image/horoscope combination that matched the sign the date fell under. Ultimately we found implementing this was trickier than what about a day’s worth of kotlin tutorials had prepared us for.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our end result is extremely simple, but we’re proud that we were able to make an app that performs the basic function we set out to create, though it might not be very versatile under the hood.

What we learned

We are definitely more comfortable in Android Studio now! We’ve learned:

how to set images as backgrounds
how to arrange buttons in a table
what fragments are and why they might be used
a tiny bit of xml and kotlin!

What's next for Doggoscopes

We don’t have plans to revamp Doggoscopes in the near future, but we can see ourselves continuing to learn and potentially revisiting it later down the road.