DistanceConnect

Inspiration

Feeling the urge to meet up with your friends? Want to connect with them more? Don't break social distancing, use DistanceConnect! Gamify social distancing by:

Place markers on a map, snapshotting what you're doing at the time
After a day, your friends near that location will be able to collect the marker for points
Compare scores on a leaderboard

What it does

DistanceConnect consists of two views, and the main one is where you can view your friends' markers and the create marker button. The markers display the name and message of your friend.

In the create marker page, you are able to search through your phone's image gallery and select a photo to display. This requires storage permission. You are also able to write a message, which is sent back to the main view when you click submit.

The app also accesses a .json in order to change the map color, which I thought was pretty cool.

What we learned

Over the course of development, we learned to use Android studio, Google API, and Firebase.

We also learned mobile development is very different to web development! This was our first time writing an app, and there were a lot of...false starts...and not understanding code. In the end, we succeeded in putting together a prototype of our planned features.