UWaterlooPlus

Inspiration

Productivity and efficiency is vital for the development of any project and even the personal growth of the developer themselves, which is why we built this application to help people gain working efficiency and (hopefully) reduce our own procrastination XD.

What it does

This app features the journey of a virtual character. When user decides to focus on their work without distractions with phones, they can schedule it in this app and set the time period they will be working. As the user finishes the period without distractions on their phones, the character moves forward as a reward for the user; otherwise, the character moves backwards as a penalty. We believe in this way, users of this app would increase their working efficiency so that they can achieve the goals they set for the day.

How we built it

We built it using Android Studio, Java and XML from scratch. Each team member works on one feature of this app and we integrated it.

Challenges we ran into

All members in the team have very minimal experience with Android mobile development. We learned all required skills in XML, the Android API and some advanced Java skills during the event. Therefore, basically everything is very challenging for us. In particular, embedding a timer, getting Input/Output to work and embedding a calendar inside our app, which will be something to work on later.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we are able to learn so much about a new area of technology and apply our skills in building a functional project in such a short period of time. We believe that the experience of building this app greatly manifests our problem solving and troubleshooting skills.

What we learned

As mentioned above, we learned Android Studio and XML from scratch, and worked on some advanced Java that even our most experienced Java developer was unaware of. This experience arouses our interests in mobile app development and we would further study it in the future.

What's next for UWaterlooPlus

First steps would be embedding a functional calendar inside the app so that user can schedule their plans more conveniently. Then we would like to get a designer to work on better graphics in terms of the reward/penalty game aspect to make the app look more appealing to users.

Built With

Submitted to

StarterHacks 2019

Created by

I led the team in deciding on who should work on which feature of the app. Then I worked on the calendar scheduling feature of the app where great difficulty arises when I tried to use external libraries that are somehow incompatible with the SDK version. In the end it was a really tough experience, but it motivated me to learn more in this field.

I'll make a comeback one day. Stay tuned

Jianyuan (Bob) Su
I contributed the concept, the blueprint, and the basic structure of our project. I also worked on the activity monitoring part which is to create a new "adventure", in which users can decide how long they want focus from smart phone and as long as they leave the activity, some "punishment" would appear. It was my first time to develop an android application and I learned all the knowledge during the hackthon. I have to say it was really tough but quite fun with studying and team-working.

Yusu Zhao
I was responsible for the I/O, opening scene, virtual character status and graphics.

It's a difficult project for all of us, since it's our first android project. None of us knew android programming before. We learnt Android within these 24 hrs. We put a lot of effort. I love it.

Life is hard, life is cool.

Bruce Wang
I was primarily responsible for testing and debugging preliminary code, however I touched on every aspect of development with the project, including designing and coding.

Robbie Zhao

Updates

Jianyuan (Bob) Su started this project — Jan 13, 2019 11:57 AM EST

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