Palimpsest

Inspiration

All around us we always see people glued to their phones, holed up in their rooms, wasting their lives away. This comes with numerous negative effects including increased likelyhood of getting heart disease, as well as overall worsened mental health, with studies showing that depression and anxiety were far more common among these people. The way I saw it was that by making people get out of their houses (willingly), most if not all of these other problems would be solved, which led to the ideation of our app, Palimpsest.

What it does

Palimpsest is social media but with a twist, as any other good social media app is. While social media platforms like instagram, snapchat, and tiktok keep their users hooked with mind numbing, dopamine inducing, and largely useless content, we keep our users hooked by making them have to move around to get their daily dose of dopamine and social updates. Palimpsest is an app where users can make stories or posts like instagram at a specific location, that can ONLY be viewed at that location, forcing people to get out of their house and walk around to get in on "the tea".

How we built it

We built palimpset by first mocking up it's design on figma. From there we built our backend with node.js and deployed it onto a free vps (thank you oracle!), opened up port 80 and 443 for http and https respectivey, and started to work on the ui. We built the ui using Apple's SwiftUI language, and while it was somewhat difficult at first, we eventually figured it out and ended up with a result that we think looks pretty good!

Challenges we ran into

The hard parts of building this app were: resisting the urge to vibe code the entire thing, actually learning how to program with Swift, and making sure that all data transfers and locations/location sharing was secure. We eventually did figure out how to program with swiftui, and turns out it pretty intuitive and that Apple actually has a lot of the hard stuff done for us! We also figure out our security and privacy concerns by encrypting location and user data using bcryptjs and jose JWT.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of how the app turned out design wise. It doesn't just look like one of those web wrapper that you bookmark to make it look like an app, it is ACTUALLY an app, running natively on our iphones!

What we learned

During this hackathon, we learned how to program with swift, how to use javascript encryption libraries, and not to drink too much kool aid in the morning (we were tired for the rest of the day)! We also learned all that sappy stuff about perseverance and what not but we did actually understand those sayings. instead of just listening and repeating them like robots. Overall it was an extremely fun experience and we will all definitely be back next year!