Palette-Team Swaghax, #29

Inspiration

Quarantine has been a tough time for everyone. Were you feeling stressed with nothing to do? Worry no more Team Swag Hacks brings you Palette.

Being Stuck in this quarantine, our team tried everything to stay occupied and stress free, however with all the news and excessive workload it was becoming difficult. Having to limit outside interaction, it became very stressful having nothing fun to do. This led us to researching ways to have a clear mind and we came upon Art Therapy. Art therapy has been dated to be the best method to help users to relieve pain, stress and anxiety. Our team wanted to spread this form of therapy and motivate others to try it out and see the wonders. That is why we have created Palette, an app which shines light upon Art Therapy. Whether that be drawing stick figures, shapes, doodles or sketches and paintings, Palette caters to all!

What it does

The app acts as a platform for users to browse artwork, learn artistic skills live from various professionals and participate in amazing challenges. Users are able to browse tutorials to learn different art techniques and learn them live from various professionals or like minded individuals. To inspire and motivate users for Art therapy, Palette offers competitions from various companies that have immense awards and perks as well. Users can choose to participate in these competitions or just draw and design for fun. Once a user has finished their piece they also receive points for uploading and sharing their work, which they can use for discounts on purchasing art pieces. A user may even decide to list their art piece for sale or just upload it to get feedback and network with like minded artists.

How We built it

The app prototype was built in Adobe XD, a software designed to help map out mobile applications. You can view the live prototype through the links below. The backend code for user input for uploading images, creating accounts, leveling up and post statistics was done using python, using the pycharm ide.

Our code consists of 6 implementations of Palette’s features. Firstly, we can create new accounts and store them in organized JSON files on a web server. For now, all demonstrations will be shown on a local database. To make a new account, we simply put in the command along with three values; the username for the account, the email, and the password. This will create a dedicated folder for each user that is added, containing their basic user data.Secondly there is the posting feature, which takes three values. The username of the account that is posting, the path of the media that is to be posted and finally the caption to the post. Each post’s media is backed up to the database, along with the statistics for the post itself (likes & comments). Each post also consists of a unique ID to help identify it with other aspects of the program. Next, there are functions to store information on an account's followers and who they are following. The information of their statistics are stored along with the rest of their individual data for easy and efficient access from the app. Lastly, there are the like and comment functions. These functions are stored individually with every post and work through a program scanning every post and identifying which post that matched the unique ID of the post being interacted with. The likes and who liked the media is stored along with the comment and respective commenter safely on our database.

Challenges We ran into

We knew we didn't have enough time to make a fully working app in two days, so we decided to use a new application called Adobe XD to map out the app and show off our design skills. We were having difficulty with creating a database to store the user info and create an algorithm that would provide accurate statistics for the user. We were having difficulty storing the password and keeping the data organized for the user to view and monitor. To overcome this we stored the info as separate files which were recalled at a later state and used local servers to make a database.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We were happy to see that our Adobe XD prototype was working, as it was amazing to see the app in our drafts come to life without real code. It was also a heartwarming feeling when we were able to simulate a working login, and statistical code. It was a beautiful piece of workaround code that ended up being useful. We gave each action a unique ID and to make these features work that unique ID would be recalled, this way the code was organized and executed with efficiency. We were also proud with the rendering of our video, as creating the mockups was also a very tedious and lengthy task. By having the whole team work together we were able to split up the video work and by doing so editing and rendering was done a lot quicker.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively use Adobe XD as a substitute for creating real apps. We also learned how to work around databases and use local servers to perform our tasks. This was also our first time using Adobe After Effects.We learned how to incorporate professional mockups in our videos to lift our user experience. We also learned how to use the .json library to create small intriguing modules which we plan to use for other projects. Overall it was indeed an excellent experience, and we learnt a lot about video editing and python modules.

What's next for Palette

The next steps for our project are to use Xcode and android studios to code out the UI prototype into a real global app with help from developers and get financial support to hire people to update the media catalogue of various territories. We would also like to enhance our Python code as currently it is just the backend and to make it usable for users we will need to add on additional front end code which must all work in sync with the Xcode. We plan to continue promoting healthy mental health through Palette so everyone can truly remain stress free!