Amitee

Inspiration

Even though the pandemic has been going on for a while, we found that a lot of people still had trouble dedicating time to spend with friends. Now that things are opening up again, we were inspired to create an app that can help with that.

What it does

Our program finds free time in the user's calendar and using those free time slots creates a new calendar with recommendations on how to use the free time.

How we built it

We used Google's oauth to create credentials for the app which we used along with Google's python API and oauth API to request user authourization and then access and interact with their calendar.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we had was with encryption. we did not know how to encrypt and decrypt our credentials so we had to leave it as is. Another problem we faced was setting contraints so that new events are not created during nighttime. Initially we set nighttime hours of 10 pm to 8 am, and we had some trouble in working around those constraints, but we eventually understood that it would be easier to hardcode those 15 minute blocks as busy, instead of trying to filter out the times when we created the events.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of using this hackathon as an opportunity to expand our skills and try something new. All of us gained some experience with the Google Calendar API, which was completely new to us before this weekend. It was also really rewarding to actually get a working prototype that is relatively close to what we were imagining when we started the hackathon.

What we learned

We gained a lot of experience through this hackathon. First and foremost, we gained experience using the Google Calendar API, creating a Google Cloud project to complete our task. In the process of finding free time in our user's schedule, we learned how to retrieve and read information about existing events. Then in creating events, we learned how to assemble a Json object that matched what the Google Calendar API was looking for in Python. We also learned about the authentication process in using the API, and understood ways to reduce the hassle of authenticating on each login. Moreover, in creating our application, we gained experience in thorpy, a GUI library that built upon pygame.

What's next for Amitee

For Amitee, there's a lot of further development available to improve the functionality and flexibility in creating social opportunities for our users. The biggest change would be to improve our communication on our user interface of what our product actually does, adding events that represent possible ideas of how to constructively spend their free time. Moreover, we could add flexibility of which idea they want to do by providing the times they are free and a list of possible ideas for them to choose, instead of us randomly choosing one based on the length of free time. We could also provide more functionality on creating the calendar events, providing them space to type in descriptions and invite friends via email directly on our application, instead of having to coordinate with them separately.