Venting Diary

An android app for mental health

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Inspiration: During COVID-19 many people, including myself, felt the extreme loneliness of quarantine and remote schooling/work. I felt like I had no one to talk to and I saw people on social media saying the same thing so I decided to make this app to address this problem. After this pandemic people truly understand the importance of mental health and are investing time into it, such as myself.

What Venting Diary does: In short, Venting Diary is a private mood tracker and diary. On the mood tracker side, there are 5 different moods the user can pick from to describe their feelings. Once they select their mood they get a response from the app and can view their stats (how many times they chose a mood). On the diary/venting side, the user can vent their emotions or log their day through text or audio. They can view their diary entries through the app’s built-in audio player and text reader, and have the option to also share or delete the entry. There are additional features like a daily notification and passcode feature to make the app better, safer, and effective.

As a whole the app will allow people to destress and express feelings (positive or negative) in a safe and private environment, which they can look back on later.

How I built it: I built this app using Java and Kotlin in Android Studio. Android Studio is the IDE made for app development. It is old and sometimes difficult and overwhelming to use but it is very well researched. I also used Adobe Creative Cloud to create specific emojis and I used UI/UX design to make the app stylish and user-friendly.

Challenges I ran into: There were many challenges I ran into from syntax errors, to not knowing how to implement the features I wanted, to the gradle being out of sync. The biggest challenges were the daily notification and design of the app (changed depending on the phone and font size). However I used my debugging skills and the logcat to fix the source of the apparent errors, and also make the app uniform across devices.

Accomplishments that I am proud of: I am super proud of the app in general, but specifically I am proud of the daily notification and password feature. They were hard to implement but work really well now. I am also proud of the design and functionality of the app. It works really well on my phone and on the virtual machines I have run the app on, which makes me believe it will be a great app in the future.

What I learned: I learned how to code in Java and Kotlin and learned how to use the complex Android Studio. It was a long and tiresome process but it was well worth it. I also learned a lot more about youth and adult mental health and the problems surrounding it. I learned to use online tools like Adobe Creative Cloud to create icons and online tools to make mockups of my design (the ones in the photo section).

What's next for Venting Diary: There are so many more things I wish to add to this app. For example I want to make an export button so you can save everything to a cloud storage like Google Drive. In addition I want to add more moods and improve the app. Then I want to make it into a web app and then make an IOS version using Swift. I hope you enjoyed my app!

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