CatchUp

Inspiration

It's so easy to drift from your close friends when caught up in your own world. We wanted to make a platform that allows you to stay connected easily with others and catch up with old friends to see how they're doing.

What it does

Everyday, CatchUp will send a notification to all users to go on the app for their daily 5 minute video call with a friend. Once the app is opened, the app randomly selects someone from the user's friend list to video call and they will be able to have a short conversation and to check up on each other. CatchUp makes it easy to have a short conversation and stay connected with your friends.

How we built it

Our group was interested in app development so chose to use Android Studio although not many of us were familiar with the platform. We had to learn the basics of coding in Kotlin, designed the UI of the app using Jetpack Compose and worked on implementing the Twilio video calling API into our app.

Challenges we ran into

As this was the first hackathon that we've participated in, we struggled heavily with setting up and learning how to start our first project.

1. Firstly, we were unfamiliar with what platforms to use for our project. We began experimenting with Flutter and FlutterFlow to work on the UI and tried to implement it with android studio along with Twilio. We found that it was too difficult to integrate the code from Flutter with Twilio on android studio so we switched to using Jetpack Compose for the UI.
2. We struggled to set up the Twilio video calling API as it was our first time using a software like this. It took a lot of time to figure out how to download and set it up and deploy it into android studio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all proud to say that we have completed our first ever hackathon! We are also proud of the new skills we’ve learned throughout implementing our project including using Android Studio, Jetpack Compose for creating our UI, and learning the basics of Kotlin. For most of us, it was the first time we have worked with these different softwares and we made the best of it.

What we learned

How essential it is to be aware of what software, API's, & SDK's we can use and that are compatible with each other as soon as possible. We also learned how to use Git and Github properly and effectively. For next time, definitely setting these kinds of things up at the very beginning of a project/hackathon would definitely be the most beneficial.

What's next for CatchUp

• Looking into integrating phone numbers/Google/Facebook for the login, and integrating firebase with this to host server information.
• Aspiring to fully complete our application with the Twilio API fully integrated and working
• Deploy the app in the Google Play store

Built With

• android-studio
• java
• jetpack-compose
• kotlin
• twilio
• ui