MyWaveDirect

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for developing this mobile app was to learn how to build and also provide a structured app that can be used in the real world. When we saw WaveDirect was looking for an app that was easy to understand and simple user interface. We saw this as an opportunity to test our knowledge and skills to see how they would stack up against real-world problems.

What it does

This app is to be used for WaveDirect users to be able to manage their accounts on our mobile app. This app includes a secure authentication along with being to update a user account info. It would have alsoincluded a live tech support chat that connects the user to a chat service where they can talk to technical support about any issues they are experiencing. If there is a particular area that is having problems or outages, our app has an outage map that updates in real-time and notifies residents when the area they live in has an outage.

How we built it

In the back-end, flask was used to construct the various functions from the automated email referral function to the secure authentication. In the front-end react-native was used to construct the app interface.

Challenges I ran into

In the back end, one of the challenges that we came across was with the automated email function. The problem was not the function itself, but the email that the function was used to send out those automated emails. The email we were using is on Google's Gmail platform where Google blocked the app from using the email due to it not being secure enough. This was resolved by lowering the security setting which allowed the automated function to work. In the front-end, one of the main challenges was getting the transitions between pages and menus to pop up once a user did a certain gesture. After time spent debugging, the program finally started to transition properly. Authentication was also a hassle, as we had to manage various tokens used for verification, authentication, and administration.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the security authentication and the ability to add and edit documents from the MongoDB database. This was done through PyMongo and this allowed the back-end to talk to the server and send information to each other. From the front-end, we are proud of the simplistic layout and design of our mobile app.

What I learned

We learned that there are many small problems that we need to be aware of when developing something like this. Be it a drop-down menu or a whole function that collects data from a database, everything can take up a lot of time in the bigger picture. Furthermore, we learned that we need to be more efficient with our tasks and debugging.

Relation to Challenges

We made this app as part of the WaveDirect challenge. We didn't manage to complete the chat feature, but we did basically all the others. We used the Maps API from GCloud as well.

What's next for MyWaveDirect

The next step for our mobile app is to increase the fluidity and make the app more aesthetically pleasing and also adding more functions like making bill payments from within the app or being able to monitor users on your network.