Slice of Life

Slice of Life: a time slice tracking desktop app, designed to inspire a healthier lifestyle.
Slice of Life: a time slice tracking desktop app, designed to inspire a healthier lifestyle.

About

Welcome to Slice of Life! 🌱 Slice of Life is a time slice tracking desktop app, designed to inspire a healthier lifestyle. Please note that the code that calculates the pie chart is modified from code I found online here: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/javaexamples/gui_piechart.htm Authorship is documented in the code. All other code is original and was entirely written during the hackathon. Additionally, all artwork and animation was done during the hackathon.

Inspiration

The idea for this project came to me at 12 am while I was trying to fall asleep; the idea being that it could be helpful for people to visualize their day as slices of a pizza or cake. This idea eventually evolved into a lifestyle tracker with a calm and relaxing feel, where users could compare their daily slices to their goals.

What it does

Slice of Life helps you track how you spend your time daily, in order to encourage a more balanced and healthy lifestyle. Users can navigate between the "today" page and the "goals" page. On the "goals" page, you can set goals for your ideal day by splitting up a pie chart of 24 hours into 8 categories: fitness, study, work, sleep, self care, hobbies, social, and chores. Here you can also check in with your goals to get a recommendation on how you're budgeting your time. On the "today" page, you can enter a slice to indicate what you've done so far today. You can also check in with your daily slices, and see how they compare to your goals.

How we built it

Slice of Life is coded in Java. I used the Swing library for the GUI, as well as WindowBuilder for Eclipse IDE. Artwork and animation was done in Procreate.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of debugging was involved along the way. Some bugs included: the pie chart displaying more than 24 hours worth of slices, inaccurate numbers when trying to find the top 3 deviations from goals to display on the “today check-in” page, and page UIs not updating after the user submitted a slice or reset the chart. At some point, I also realized I had a lot of repeated code and had to combine and condense it. Overall, I feel this project went fairly smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I like the way I structured my GUI (each page is a panel container filled with its components, and the panel is hidden and shown as needed to navigate between pages), and I’m proud that I finished this project in just about a day.

What we learned

I continue to learn more and more about programming in Java, as well as designing functional and useful applications that are user-friendly and can really help people.

What's next for Slice of Life

There’s a lot I would have liked to add to Slice of Life, but I didn’t have too much time. I wanted to add a “Timer” page in addition to “Today” and “Goals”, where instead of entering a slice, the user could choose a category to set a timer for, and once they finished doing their activity for that time, it would be automatically added to the “Today” chart. Additionally, I wanted to add capabilities to save your goals by reading and writing a file. Finally, I would’ve liked to add some transitional animations between pages, to make it look smoother and more polished. But this is just the first prototype, and I’m happy with how it turned out!