Pendulum

Our Inspiration

We were on a call, pulling our hair, struggling to find an app idea themed around time when I got a notification about an assignment due the next day. I thought to myself "just 5 more minutes" and that's when it strikes us. For years we’ve told ourselves “just 5 minutes” to try and take a break from studying for a test or finishing an assignment, however when we grow older it turns from a harmless to a rather destructive habit, since it promotes instant gratification over work and severely decreases productivity, lowering our grades. Humans, my friend, are flawed beings which means we absolutely cannot rely on willpower to fix this situation and therefore we decided to make Pendulum.

What It Does

Pendulum blocks distracting websites from the get-go but takes a creative approach doing so. If you try to visit any website, you will be presented instead with a question we like to call a "puzzle" (it's really just an arithmetic operation but puzzle just sounds better). If you answer this question correctly, you will be given access to the website for 5 minutes after which it will again be blocked. At some point during the cycle of filling out the puzzle, the user will either get irritated and close the tab or realise how many "5 minutes" they take before closing the distraction and try to be more productive. A bonus point is improving your mental maths everytime you decide to scroll through instagram for 5 minutes.

We feel like apps that outright block the websites annoy the user overtime which results in them deleting the app and going back to their old habits, or just suppresses the urge long enough but doesn't fix the underlying issue. Pendulum slowly conditions people to avoid distracting websites and discourages wasting time on those sites, as a bonus the users apply their brain everytime they want access and once that gets tiring, they can go back to work. Slowly their time on distracting websites will reduce as instant gratification becomes delayed, which is the ultimate goal of this chrome extension.

How we built it

We built this using a technology called manifest-3, provided by google for chrome extension developers. Along with that we utilised HTML5 & CSS3 for designing the page that shows the puzzle and Javascript for the backend (blocking/unblocking the website, loading the puzzle and checking the answer, communicating with the extension, etc).

Challenges

We ran into a lot of challenges along the way... (1) We started off building this project by using python but soon (not soon enough) we realised it would be extremely difficult to record and filter every TCP/IP packet the computer is sending and receiving so we had to switch to chrome extensions so that we can use the in-built functions to recognize the sites being visited. (2) For no apparent reason, a few websites would simply not load our custom HTML page and others would keep on reloading it even after the answer was correct. We wriggled our way out of this one by debugging for 3 hours or so and realising it's just an issue with chrome's permission settings. (3) To load out custom HTML page on the blacklisted websites required us to edit their DOM which turned out to be excruciatingly difficult since well most websites don't want you messing with their DOM in the first place (4) Neither of us had a lot of experience in javascript but due to chrome extensions that was the language we were limited to so we had to spend the first 3 hours of the hackathon absorbing javascript tutorials.

Accomplishments

(1) No matter how much we failed and how many stupid yet really annoying errors we faced, we actually managed to finish the project with all the features we had planned to include. (2) We thought and then brought to life an idea that is actually useful not only to us but a large group of people. (3) Both of us have less than a year of experience in programming in general and basically 48 hours of experience in javascript to date however we still managed to complete this project.

Our Learning

Most importantly we learnt how to talk to girls (all credit goes to Sean Wang). On a serious note though we learnt literally an entire new language through this hackathon but also collaboration. Neither of us had ever created a project in a team with multiple people editing the github repo simultaneously before this project and it was an amazing experience.

What's Next

We genuinely believe in the potential of something like this so we have decided that after Clock Hacks we are going to get this extension approved and published on the chrome webstore so that everyone can use it (without compiling the source code).

Built With

• css3
• github
• html5
• javascript
• json
• manifest-3