FOCUS

Publish Punishment
Choose Punishment
Starting Scene
During Countdown
If Successfully Finished
During Countdown
If quit in the middle
Log in

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this iOS app after realizing how much precious time we wasted on our mobile devices everyday. According to RealizD, a productivity app, I dedicated nearly 4 hours to using my phone daily. Over the course of 60 years, this amounts to a whopping 10 years spent staring at a tiny screen. Our app "FOCUS" is a productivity app that aims to help users spend less time on their mobile devices, and therefore become more efficient with their time. Even small interruptions caused by incoming messages and Snapchats can wreak havoc on any attempt to concentrate. FOCUS provides users with both negative and positive incentives to get their work done. Users have the option to set a timer for a certain amount of time. As the timer ticks down, an egg slowly hatches into a cute baby dragon. However, if users close out of the app, they will be punished by an embarrassing post on their Facebook timeline which is randomly generated from a collection of phrases in our database.

How I built it

We used swift in XCode for front end development. We implemented this using with the support of Facebook Framework. Once logged in, we have the access to user's profile, friend and post actions (since Facebook has to approve this, this can only be tested through our own Facebook account). We then use a timer and picker view to select punishments and time. We also keep track of users' actions to this app, i.e. quitting the app will result in a notification and ending the timer.

Challenges I ran into

We had an enormous amount of trouble getting Facebook authentication as well as issue with server implementations for future expansions.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Although our product isn't quite finished, we are very proud of ourselves for stepping way out of our comfort zone and sticking with it for 24 hours. On the back-end side, we had little to no experience of how to use Node.js or Mongo. Much of our time was spent going learning through tutorials and the documentation.

What's next for FOCUS

In the future, we hope to implement a LOT more features. We want to include a scoring system and leaderboard where friends can connect with each other and compare their productivity. We also want to bring in a wider assortment of dragons and clean up our drawings a bit. We might also think of more punishments that we can use to hammer in our emphasis on productivity. Perhaps this will entail a monetary incentive, in which users put down some amount of money before they begin the challenge. If they fail, the money will be donated to charity.