Du Jour

Inspiration

We decided that an application built around documenting our lives would be a useful, industrious, and engaging challenge that could produce a genuinely useful tool, even after 24 hours.

What it does

Du Jour documents various aspects of your life depending on personal preferences, such as day to day mood, period schedules, and money spent. A secondary focus of Du Jour is it's extensive file system, which it uses to configure and re-use information in order to create a better experience.

How I built it

We assembled individual aspects of the application, and compiled them in a main .java file that calls the different applications based on user input. As soon as we had completed our first application, we began constructing the GUI for that individual aspect.At this point, we branched off to different tasks so as to continue developing more aspects.

Challenges I ran into

The steepest learning curve for our group was our lack of experience with JFrame, as well as the algorithmic thinking required to set dynamic values to file contents and names. We ran into a major problem when designing a counter in the Du Jour Yours file names that would prohibit the application from overwriting existing files from the same day, effectively only allow the user to have one journal entry per day. We fixed this by incrementing a value in a file then using that new value to construct the file name.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a group, we are definitely proud of how this competition has filled in the gaps in our knowledge, making us more adept java developers. More so than this, however, we are proud of our growth in fields we knew nothing about. One of our members learned a ridiculous amount of Java at this event, while another became more fluent with Java Swing.

What I learned

We learned what we need to learn. This event was a fun study of just how little we know, and how much more there is to learn.

What's next for Du Jour

Du Jour's future entails a unique GUI, as well as more useful abilities. Aspects that weren't created tonight include pill reminders, a sleep timer, and adding a "star" to journal entries to flag especially important days. With these would also come an android application, and later an iOS application, because day planners are much better on a phone.

Built With

• java