Waterlicious

This project helps human well-being by reminding its users to drink water, an action that is so important but often forgotten and underrated.

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During quarantine, we started to spend more time sitting in front of our desks and it became easier to grab a glass of water. A dramatic change in our physical well-being and mental mood followed this simple action. For example, drinking water recharged our energy and smoothed intense headaches. This life lesson made us have the idea of creating a mobile application that can lead other people onto this way of living a healthy lifestyle.

To begin, we used Figma to build our mock project. Neither of us had used Figma before, but with a little trial and error, we managed to figure out its basics and created an aesthetically pleasing storyboard. Figma helped us develop the original concept that we had by breaking down our thoughts into different screens and features that we wished to add.

Both of us are regular users of the IOS system, so we chose to use the Swift as the language of our project. As coding beginners, we had zero previous knowledge of Xcode or Swift. Thus, simply coding any project regardless of its size was a true challenge.

In Xcode, we used SwiftUI to design the user interface of our app as we had read that it was the latest and easiest to learn user interface tool of Apple. For our sign in/up feature, we learned to integrate Firebase into our Xcode project.

Our first biggest challenge was trying to collaborate on Xcode. We originally thought that it would have a collaboration tool similar to Google Docs that will allow both of us to work simultaneously in our code. One of the most popular recommandations that we found online was to share the code on GitHub. However, setting up GitHub in our Xcode project turned out to be a lot more problematic than we expected. It involved working with our computer’s terminal a lot which is something we are not very familiar or comfortable with yet. Frequent errors started popping up as we tried committing and pushing the project into GitHub, and, thus, we decided, as it was taking a lot of our time in such a short weekend, to simply screenshare in order to collaborate.

Our second biggest challenge was integrating Firebase into our project. In order to do so, we were required to learn quite a lot about how the Terminal and how things such as the cd command and CocoaPods work.

Our third biggest challenge was including the color palette that we originally came up with on Figma, in our project. Nearly each component of the screens has specific ways of modifying its color. We also had to learn how to use custom colors in Xcode instead of the basic Swift ones.

Lastly, our biggest challenge was the lack of time. There are many things that we would have loved to add to our App if we had more time. To start with, we would love to make the timer feature functional. We would also want to add a notification feature that reminds users to drink water every 30 minutes once the timer is up. To do so, we were thinking of maybe using the class UNTimeIntervalNotificationTrigger in Swift. In addition, we wanted to ask the user when they first created their account what their sleep schedule was so that the app could start sending notifications every 30 minutes from the time they wake up till the time they go to sleep.

To conclude, in the midst of this hackathon focused on AI, we were inspired by some of the conferences and workshops we had the chance to attend. In fact, one of the features we would have liked to add was an Image Recognition tool. As the timer ends every 30 minutes, the user would need to take a picture of their drink, and the software would need to confirm that it’s in fact a drink in order for the user to win points and unlock achievements. We think that the rewarding approach could be a good way of motivating users to continue using the app and stay hydrated.

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