Inspiration
No matter how busy you are, finding a time to meet that's perfect for everyone's schedules is a really frustrating task in college. We are currently working on a team of six on a pretty involved project, and scheduling meetings and events is _ always _ difficult. Sometimes we just want to know when the most people possible could make it to a meeting, so it isn't always a matter of looking for white space on a Google Calendar.
Trying to find a good time to meet is even harder for short-term class projects, where it doesn't make sense to put everyone's schedule into a calendar. In these situations it takes a ton of back and forth over GroupMe to iron out a good time, which often involves waiting a few hours for that last person to respond.
Aside from group projects, we also thought it would be convenient to be able to check a friend's schedule and see when they're free. Right now we send a screenshot of our schedules and then have to dig through messages to find the image just to see when our friends have class.
What it does
FreeTime allows users to search for their friends who are signed up on the app and then select a group from their friends list to compare schedules. The comparing feature displays a calendar color coded based on how many people in the group are free at each time interval. The app also allows users to view any of their friends' schedules as well to quickly check if they're free.
How we built it
We used React Native for the front end, Node JS in the back end with Redux in the front end to manage state. We had 2 servers, one for managing our users in a mongoose database and 1 for parsing incoming emails and making a request to the other server to update the database.
Challenges we ran into
Having never made a React Native app before, we ran into issues just getting started with that. We also hit bumps with not getting wifi, and actually had to go to another building for most of the hack, but we persevered.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of how much we were able to accomplish with just two people. We were thinking we'd have to compromise one of the larger elements of the app for time's sake, but it looks like we're actually going to get done what we wanted to.
What we learned
Neither of us has worked on a React Native app before, so needless to say, we learned a ton from this project. Both of us expanded our skillsets, and that was our main goal!
What's next for FreeTime
We've been wanting to build this app for a really long time, because we know how useful it would be to us, so we'd like to keep developing it and get it to a place where we can use it. If all goes well, we'd love to bring it to all Penn State students.
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