Smylest

Be a hero or find a hero in an app where smiles are always in fashion! Whether you're looking for a compliment or to spread cheer, Smylest can accomplish both anytime, anywhere, and anonymously.

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Smylest | /Smile-lest/ | noun.
A hero who makes the world a better place, fashioning one smile at a time

Everyone deserves a smile, but sometimes it's not so easy to get one. Whether you're feeling great or looking for a confidence boost, Smylest is here to connect smile-bringers to smile-needers to save the day, one smile at a time.

As an Android app, Smylest empowers users to seek and share happiness quickly, easily, and anonymously. In the final product, requests for smiles and responses will be passed through a hate/harassment/profanity filter that automatically blocks inbound and outbound messages that would do more harm than good.

Inspiration

In a world where technology, stress, and hustle culture produce some of the highest rates of isolation and depression we've seen, the power of a smile is too often overlooked. With all that time spent alone and technology an arm's reach away, why not bring the power of smiles to you?

Smylest is born from the belief that positive comments from those outside your friend group or family are the ones that resonate the most. As a mobile app that brings positive people straight to those who need it most, Smylest aims to combat the issues of loneliness and depression while providing a means for everyone, no matter who they are or how they feel, to feel a bit better and make the world a bit better, one smile at a time.

What it does

Feeling down or in need of a confidence-booster? Open the Smylest app to compose an anonymous message that anyone in the world (or targeted groups) may reply to, giving you a personalized response that'll make you go :D in a matter of minutes.

Feeling great? Use that superpower! Become a Smylest for a day and browse anonymous smile requests that you may respond to, sharing the power of a :D. Making a positive impact has never been so easy!

How I built it

With time of the essence, this being my first Hackathon, and my status as a solo dev, I knew I had to minimize the number of tools I used in order to achieve my goals. For this reason, I opted for Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, which allowed me to accurately capture the user experience and mimic key functionalities without the need to write a backend. With these tools picked from the beginning, my work was much more manageable, consisting of MS Whiteboard for mockups and task-keeping, Photoshop for designing graphics, Draw.io for UML diagramming, and Android Studio for putting everything together in a functioning prototype.

Challenges I ran into

Despite having worked with the Jetpack Compose framework quite a bit in the past and through ACM@UGA's Open Source Project, there was still a decent amount of unexplored features that were tough to work out at first. Particularly difficult at first for me was handling navigation. I also spent a considerable amount of Saturday evening attempting to figure out Android's data storage methods so I could allow my components to read/write data from files, but I shifted priorities when I exhausted all options, so a half-win if you will(?).
TIME. As my first Hackathon, I vastly overestimated how much could be accomplished in such a small period of time. Although I'm very happy with my final product, there are quite a few features and functionalities that I wish I could've implemented, but time simply didn't allow.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

For my first hackathon experience and the fact that I'm a solo dev, I'm quite proud of my submission as a whole. While I wish I had more time to fully flesh this project out, I'm very pleased with its visual visual polish, its (seeming 🤞) stability, and its ability to convey my goal for the project: creating a friendly, inviting place where smiling heroes and those in need of a smile can meet.

What I learned

SO much about Jetpack Compose and SO much I do not know as well! It's quite a big framework and although I kept falling down increasingly more complex rabbit holes, I kept finding that there's still so much to learn. I was successful in my navigation endeavors, figuring out text input, and meshing many different aspects of the project together (like project resources, data, and components), providing me some great experience with the Android development workflow.

What's next for Smylest

Regardless of this project's success in the competition, I would love to explore the possibility of further refining it into a concept that I can officially deploy in hopes of making some positive change on a broader scale.

~Built by Justin Brand~

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