Inspiration
As I observe food store owners trying to sell as much food as possible by putting signs in front of their shop and touting to passers-by before closing their shop and throwing all the remaining unsold food. I felt that there is a need for a way for merchants to reach out to even more users, to bring awareness to users about the clearance sale of the merchant's food. Therefore, in line with the SmartNation initiative to reduce food wastage, an idea to connect store owners to mobile phone users is being developed.
What it does
It is an application where it aims to notify a wider range of people about the food that merchants have to sell before closing their shop. A user can view the promotions of each merchant's food and a map with pin locations around Singapore alongside promotion details will be provided for users to view. A notification feature is planned to be implemented to notify users on the clearance food sale of the merchants they favourite.
How we built it
The application is developed through the use of the android studio. Splitting the home page to two fragments, one where the users can view a live post update on the food that is being sold at a discounted rate and the second fragment where google maps API is used alongside the pin locations to display information about the clearance food sale to users when user move around the google maps. The application is also being built with two different login activities upon logging into the application, one for the merchant, and the other for the user. The merchant will be able to post an update with a picture of the food they are trying to clear before they close their shops, along with the discounted price of the food onto the bulletin to allow other users to view. On the other hand, users are only allowed to view the bulletin of updates and are not allowed to post anything to the bulletin.
Challenges we ran into
Time was the main challenge. As there were not much time given to produce the application, sleep was sacrificed. As the application is very complex, the application requires many activities and many lines of code to be written. Hence, roles are being split among the team and putting the code together under one project is the toughest whereby we need to start debugging every single bit of problem we face. Some functions were also outdated as android studios have been constantly updated, hence, the problem of finding alternative functions that perform a similar function is very difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Participating and giving my best to hackathon is a great accomplishment in our opinion. Despite all the setbacks and time constraints, we have a working application. The sheer will to be awake for more than 22 hours and doing nothing but coding with a lot of self-learning just feels great. We are somewhat proud of ourselves.
What we learned
Time management and teamwork is definitely an integral part of completing tasks. We learned to take the initiative and help one another. The greatest achievement would be the familiarity with Android Studio and the sources available online. This, in turn, is going to help us to build better and more functional applications in future. Getting a sneak peek into the life of a application developers was quite insightful. We are better men and coders today.
What's next for hackathon
This experience has definitely pumped us to join more hackathon in future. The amount of knowledge and experience we gain in this 24 hours of grinding is one of a kind and is something to cherish and repeat. We all are most likely to continue working on our application as we strongly feel that it could be implemented and provide a great convenience to people. We would be saving the earth as well as everyone's money.
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