QRty

Easily share content between multiple devices

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Inspiration

How many times have you been looking at a webpage on your phone, or had an image in your gallery, and wanted to have it on your computer? Most of us have to go through the annoying process of emailing links and pictures to ourselves. Not anymore! With QRty, you can create a private room for yourself (and your friends too) where you can upload text and images and use either a room code or a QR code to join it from different devices. Anything you upload onto the server updates across all devices in real-time, enabling quick and easy access.

What it does

After accessing the website, you can either choose to create a room or join a room. If you create one, you'll be given a unique six-digit code and a QR code that can be used to access the room from other devices. If you already have a code, you can navigate to Join Room and reach it from there. After you're in your room, it's your space to do whatever you'd like! Whether you want to send yourself links, personal notes, or images, QRty is here to help you.

How we made it

We used ReactJS and Bootstrap for the frontend. For the backend, we used Socket.io to establish real-time, bi-directional communication between web clients and servers. In addition, we utilized Node.js and npm as our runtime environment and package manager. Finally, we used Google Cloud to host our images, and Heroku to host our live website.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was hosting the website. We tried various platforms, such as Heroku and Google Cloud, and we were having trouble enabling the Socket.io server to update in realtime on the live website. Many times, the website would work fine on our local machines, but not update on the live website. We also ran into issues hosting image storage with Google Cloud.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our team members has never attended a hackathon, and the rest of us do not have a great deal of experience, all as second-year college students. We are so proud that in under 24 hours, we were able to collaborate efficiently and learn the necessary tools and frameworks in order to build our project.

What we learned

We learned that 24 hours is enough time to build a working app if you work hard and communicate efficiently. We also learned that you can have fun doing it, even virtually!

What's next for QRty

We would like the history of a room to be available once new devices are added, and also add timestamps to messages. We also think it would be really cool to create an account and have "rooms" with your friends where you can communicate with them. In addition, we'd like to add support for more types of content, such as files, and an option to download both files and images to the device you are using QRty on.

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