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Register page to sign up users
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Login Page
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Main Board Page With Events
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Hack UTD Thread Page
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Temoc Thread Page
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After Talking Temoc Thread
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Pop up to confirm, deny or say IDK to an event
Inspiration
UTD is often portrayed as an antisocial campus and it's not exactly untrue. It can be very hard to find out about what's going on in campus without constantly staying updated on a Discord server or reading notice boards. So what if there was an app that can communicate the happenings on campus while being entirely community driven and led.
What it does
Heads Up, Comets! Gives UTD Comets a heads up about what's going on at UTD. It is a campus map that anyone can interact with. If you start / report something that's happening on campus everyone who is connected to app will be able to see it! You can tag these events and other community members can participate in conversation around them. What's even better, the more people that interact with or corroborate a report, the bigger it's going to be on the map. This means that anything from small study groups, reporting crime, or big events like HackUTD can be supported organically by the community on campus!
How we built it
We built this app using an Express backend and Vue.js frontend. Because this is a real-time information app, we also used Socket.io to facilitate a Server-Client relationship so that App users can be updated in real time about what's going on right now. To help with community involvement the App will sometimes request feedback from users (about ongoing events) which they can either corroborate (to support the event and give it more attention) or 'Deny'/'I don't know'.
Challenges we ran into
We had never developed anything that required a live connection like this application. It was very interesting and very fun to develop with Socket.io. Furthermore, developing anything (even a hack) under 24 hours is a very big challenge. We would have liked to add more features but the time it takes to implement core requirements is very long.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are quite proud of the concept for the app. It's always fun to develop an app that you yourself would like to use. I, for one, would love to know more about what's going on when I am on campus but making plans and finding interesting events can be a real challenge. Furthermore, this app can potentially be a very good community tool our group sees a lot of promise in.
What we learned
We strengthened our skills in both Vue.js, Node.js and learned a very relevant, very cool library called socket.io. Developing real-time applications is quite a bit different than developing our usual static websites and restful apis, but it was a nice change of pace.
What's next for Heads Up, Comets!
This application could be even more cool by providing more features and a better user experience. It's hard to implement both good program logic and a nice design in only 24 hours. The UI is definitely not easy considering the factors around the information that gets placed on the map (safety, fun, social events) and will need more work. The storage and user authentication/protection could also be drastically improved - but were cut to make time for implementing more of the core logic of the app.
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