Sky Watch

Landing Page inactive watch
Landing Page Active Watch
Maps view

Inspiration

Ever been in an unknown area with severe weather knocking on your door? Situations like these can be dangerous when you don't know where shelter might be located in an area you have never been before. Sky Watch helps solve this issue.

What it does

Sky Watch is your personal guidance app for when severe weather strikes. When a severe level warning is issued by the National Weather Service for your coordinates, Sky Watch jumps into action by sending you a notification immediately to allow you to have the most time to prepare. Inside of Sky Watch is a map where you can select the nearest safe place to shelter from the coming storms.

How we built it

We used React Native to develop this app for mobile devices. We used React's context API to manage our states across the entire app as well as handle notifications. We poll the National Weather Service API every minute to check for new warnings for your area. We put these coordinates through a nifty math equation to determine if you are inside of a warning polygon (these can have many many sides not just 4). We also use Google maps to display space points on the map as well as help navigate users to the place as well.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the location of the user was tricky but we figured it out. Notifications were also a challenge as we figured out since our app is not a true built app at the time, notifications wont currently work on the home page until we publish it to the app store or use some dev kit we don't have access too (thanks apple)