Inspiration
Our challenge was "to develop an app that simply makes it easy, convenient, and fun for people in your community to connect and plan physical activities together". Our team took a look at services that could fulfill some of our objectives. Two of them stood out in particular; Meetup.com and Tinder.
Meetup.com Meetup.com allows people with similar interests to organize events through online groups, planning and carrying out in-person events. On Meetup.com, one can easily find groups planning events from finger painting to Tai Chi. Our team concluded that we wished to develop a similar app with a much tighter focus on fitness and sport in the local community.
Tinder However, our idea only took off once we looked over Tinder. Popular among university students, Tinder allows users to search for others through liking or disliking recommended profiles. If two users like each other, a match is made and they can chat through the app. However, it is impossible to search for a specific person on the Tinder app, solely relying on its algorithms to present profiles which closely match your interests and personality.
We then thought of combining the different functions of Meetup.com and Tinder in a fitness-focused context.
What it does
_ Event Management _ A user would be able to create fitness or sport events on the app with ease. They could specifty its title, date, participants, fitness categories and more. In addition to creating an event, a user would be able to search and join public events to their liking.
_ Matchmaking _ In addition to a simple event manager, SportSort allows users to discover relevant sports events through a through a Tinder-esque matchmaking service.. A user would customize their profile to show their athletic interests, associated skill levels, and relevant dates so an algorithm can predict which nearby events would fit them the most. The user would then dynamically "swipe" through different suggested events until they found one that they were interested in.
How we built it
_ Backend _ SportSort was mainly developed in Java, with our main IDE being Eclipse.
_ Frontend _ Our .java files were then transferred over to android studio to be converted into a hybrid Java/XML format to be compatible with android phones. Unfortunately, due to certain restriction of the newest edition of Java, SportSort only works on Android versions 9.0 or higher.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to develop a database for events. Since we built SportSort from scratch without any external API's, we also had to write our own database. Bouncing around ideas for hours, we managed to find a solution through storing our database in plain text, leaving markers for the program to understand where important information lay.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Related to our challenges, our database issue took the majority of our development time, and we eventually came upon an elegant and efficient solution. We also made a large effort to keep our conventions consistent, leaving our files well organized and well labelled.
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