LeproMeter

Everything started with choosing the perfect topic to start brainstorming on. But how can you tell which is the right topic for you? Yes, we asked this question and no we could not answer it. So we just brainstormed on all the topics until one of them was really appealing. This is how the LeproMeter started to take shape.

The idea of having an app where being productive matters and its socially rewarded sounded really interesting to us. As the gamification process is known to be very effective, psychologically speaking, combining this with the idea of doing useful stuff sounds more than good.

You can share your productivity with your friends, and so all of you can see how the others performed during the day. You can set the apps that are productive and apps that are for leisure. After this, you are all set. The LeproMeter will do its job and will help you measure your laziness. In the groups, you can share this with your friends, and at the end of the day, you can have an overview.

We built this application for mobile Android devices. Our development language of choice was Kotlin, being so well integrated with the Android ecosystem, and also considering that we think it’s on its way to replace Java as the main programming language for mobile development. For version control we used git and a shared GitHub repository.

For storing data locally, we used the room library, while firebase was our choice for sharable data, in our serverless app.

During those 2 days we had different challenges that appeared in the development of the app, many of those were just Horia being an idiot. The core idea of the app is to track the time spent in the applications of the phone. Getting the data was a tricky part but in the end the information there. Another challenge was linking the app with a FireBase project, in order to track the users. This was an interesting one to tackle, but no greater than using the FireStore database for creating the groups for people. Until the end of the time this was not yet solved, but its a top priority on the future development plan.

A lot of issues involved solving git conflicts as we all worked simultaneously on different features of the application. By the end we learned how to focus our changes to specific parts of the codebase thus, minifying the risk for conflicts. The fact that the codebase grew in size also helped us to locally isolate our changes (as we are ourselves locally isolated in our houses).

Some achievements can be firstly overcoming the problems listed above, and the creation of the basics of an app that hopefully is going to help people be more effective with their time. Another achievement was that we connected ourselves for 2 days, even if we are living in these social distancing issues. We are proud that this hackathon and the work itself on this app was a very productive moment of the quarantine.

The future looks bright for this app. Except the basic, core utility that is has, which is tracking the usage of the apps and quantizing it in a score, a lot of other small features can be added in order to make from this an amazing user experience.

having an advice log, which is category based. You can set your own interests / preferences, and you will see a list of advice that people are doing in order to be productive. Every advice can be rated, and the bigger the rating, the more beneficial would be for the user. You can add as well your own advice, and start helping people around the world with your productive lifestyle. having the groups working (in the first place using firebase firestore), in order to be able to share the productivity score and be able to post advice and be visible in the community. having a challenge / bet setion. You can send challanges to friends to not use speciffic apps that you know they are using for too much leisure. Their score can be affected by the succeeding / failing the challenge. implementing a leveling / experience score. Having good productivity score can rank you up and you will get different in-app rewards for this. if everything goes well, having an Apple iOs version will be the ultimate task

All in all, the whole experience was a complete one. Fun was of course not avoided during this process and a lot of jokes and memorable events happened during these hours (listing them here would require too much text written). The app took shape quite fast and the core idea is starting to get a few layers that embrace it in a nice way, creating an unique atmosphere for the users. We hope to see you on LeproMeter and hopefully you’ll hear from us soon, via future patches and updates of the app. Untill then, #stayproductive.

Built With

• kotlin