Orfyte

Inspiration

Defi/Challenge It started with the fight with women in Iran against the morality police. I thought there must be many other hidden causes and struggles that the world didn't know about. Something was needed to support people who were fighting a silent battle, to show them that what they were fighting for was not in vain. We needed something to show people that they were not alone in their experience and that we could understand them. Something was needed to support these communities, to increase their credibility with the people with the power of numbers, to increase the power of the people, and finally, to make democracy evolve like never before. I thought that, in order to accomplish all these missions, the fact that people tell their stories themselves, as testimonies of their daily life with their problems, would add empathy to the readers who would read them, a bit like amateur journalism.

What it does

The users have a feed displaying all the causes they’re fighting for. When swiping right or left, more causes are shown to them. To access the testimonies of more people fighting for a certain cause, the date, the localization or the hashtag involved, click on the said post. There’s another sheet that allows the users to discover new causes and political stakes. Any user may post a new creed, its description and an image by clicking the blue + sign. To share a post, they can simply click on the paper plane that’s located on the upper right corner when the post has been clicked on. There are still many features I included like checking for misspelled "causes" and user registration.

How we built it

I used the Swift programming language, developed by Apple, to optimize the application's operation on Apple operating systems. The Location feature allows people to enter their location when posting a new story. Apple album integration allows users to use the photos they have in their gallery. Drag gestures make using the application much more fluid and natural. The animations that occur, for example when clicking on a story, the way the story appears on the screen. I preferred to use asynchronous image management rather than synchronous image management, to reduce the loading time of the stories.

Challenges we ran into

The new language was hard to approach The codes and references are different than with other scripts, so I had to learn quite a lot of new mechanics; The networking, Apple's privacy requirements, The Fonts, Asynchrony, The Research Algorithm

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I could say that it is the asynchronous management of the images, which allows to reduce the time of loading, at the moment of launching the application, since it is the least heavy image that is displayed first. Or the location system that displays the city from which the story was posted. No, maybe, the search algorithm? Finally, I'm proud of all 3.

What we learned

The difficulty of such challenge can hardly be handled by a single person. Looking back at all the problems faced, I realize that as a team, we could’ve approached certain situations in a better way.