Crisis App

Inspiration

I was excited to start something new and learn a new language. I suggested Crisis app to my group and we decided to get right to work after that.

What it does

Crisis app is supposed to be an app that alerts its users during a crisis (fire, shooting, weather) or give the opportunity for students to send an emergency signal, faculty to respond, and security to act. We had a number of debates about our design and its similarities to other products, and we decided to try and add features to make it stand out, such as quizzes for students on different crisis topics, easy access to tips and resources about drills/emergencies, etc.

How we built it

We used Adobe XD to get a good idea for the style and layout of our different screens on our app. We then imported certain images into Android Studio to work on the backend part of the app.

Challenges we ran into

The team had to learn a new application by the name of Android Developer from scratch. The logistics of the app were similar to other applications, so bringing new ideas into the fold on a platform none of us have worked on before has been difficult. The app had long boot-up times and came with a new language used to define the UI/UX elements of the application, as well as learning Adobe XD and importing said elements onto the app. Many of us had suffered connection difficulties and we had to restart our computers on certain occasions, which had cost us some time developing. Through the help of StackOverflow and the Adobe XD workshops, however, we were able to incorporate many features of the app and have some of them function alongside the UI, given the time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out how Android Developer works and importing images from a separate application into AD was something our team was able to accomplish quite successfully. Implementing many of the working features, alongside incorporating activities with them, is also an accomplishment our team was proud of.

What we learned

Considering this was all of our first hackathon, time management was the key lesson from this event. Even with our internet complications, the timeframe was important in allocating responsibilities to our members to complete. We also learned the functionality of not only Android Developer, but Adobe XD as well, all in a weekend. Specifically, we learned the UI code for AD and how to adjust and implement images from other sources using said UI code, how activities (Button presses, etc.) work, how intents are classes that can affect two activities at once by utilizing class names and item ids, how new Android screens correspond with both new classes and xml files representing the screen, the functionalities of spinners, scroll view in both AD and XD, how text boxes within AD can contain emails, usernames, names and passwords, and so on.

What's next for Crisis App

Since our app doesn't have all its features, our main focus is on adding the rest of the functionality to the app. This also includes implementing a database to store all users, as well as finishing and incorporating the User classes into the app. We also plan on learning more about AD to incorporate improved functionality and UI options over time.

Built With

• adobexd
• android-studio
• java
• xml