Moody

Check in with others, support mental health, elevate your mood!

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Inspiration

Moody was inspired by current events, and how we've been connecting with others during these difficult times. While self-isolating due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we notice that like ourselves, many of our friends were struggling with their mental health. Feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression, sadness and hopelessness seemed to be common. In an attempt to better connect with our friends and to help support each other, we wanted to create a simple way to check in with our loved ones and their feelings, to help to elevate our own moods as well as the moods of others.

What it does

Moody is an app designed for simple connectivity from one friend to another. Once you sign up for moody, you can actively track your moods, emotions and feelings in the Mood Calendar by entering a quick and easy mood log. If moody notices that you've been having several awful feelings or days, or that you haven't made a mood log in a while, moody will notify your friends so that they can reach out to you directly, connecting you to their support seamlessly.

Added features include a quote of the day feature and an average mood calculation as you continue to enter mood logs.

How we built it

We built this app in Android Studio using Java language and tested using a virtual android app emulator. All graphics, logos, icons and styles were created by hand by one of our very talented teammates in Adobe Photoshop!

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time trying to ensure that all of our dependencies, package and software versions were the same as we worked remotely. None of our teammates had ever used Android Studio before, much less build an entire app, so it was a challenging feat with many ups and downs. It was especially difficult to debug portions of the code when the change was only being made on one teammates screen and where the rest of us had to explain what to do verbally over our virtual call, rather than helping in -person.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this was our first time building an app, and our first time working with Android Studio, we're quite proud of the final product! We're especially impressed by the amazing artwork that went into this project, and of the dedication our teammates had to learning new techniques, tools and tricks to keep the development going. We employed a lot of teamwork and were dedicated not just to building together, but to learning together as well.

What we learned

We learned about real industry app development and software engineering principles and methodologies as we worked together in a group and tried our best to simulate a real software development cycle. We learned about nuances in Java with regards to integration into frontend coding, and we learned how to utilize software like Android Studio to our advantage. We also learned how to correctly implement and utilize virtual device emulators as a way of testing and of viewing the final product.

What's next for Moody

After this hackathon, we plan on finishing up the full development of this app and deploying it, if possible.

Software Improvements:

  • Built-in customizer so that users can change the colour scheme and accents of the app.
  • More in-depth mood categories and ratings to get more data about how our users are feeling
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