Attempt32

The Android app aims to keep city dwellers a little more cautious. It makes use of publicly available crime data and notifies the users as soon as they enter into an unsafe area!

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Inspiration

Living in the heart of a city like Philadelphia never gets me bored but at the same time, I do not feel safe walking in most of the parts of the city. As a foreigner who has only been in the city for a short time, there is no way I could be familiar with all the sketchy parts of the city to avoid. I was also reading about how cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore make their statistical data on crime locations public and open source. That's how I thought of the idea for this app. The actual name for the app is TBD but currently it just shows the number of times I restrated from scratch working on this.

What it does

It makes use of various information sources like frequency of 911 calls made from an area or cases of robbery, or even assaults. The more such cases occur in an area, the more unsafe it is. The app aims to keep the record of all the unsafe parts of the city and notify the user if they come within the 500-mile radius of the "sketchy" coordinates.

How I built it

Pulled an all-nighter Android Studio 101. Also learned a great deal about how geo-fencing works using Firebase and GeoFire. Ofcourse, learned how to deploy a functional android app which does much more than just "Hello World!". Learning to send and receive push notifications has been a long-pending goal and I was finally able to cover it in the past 24 hours.

Challenges I ran into

  • Lack of Sleep from Friday
  • No prior experience using Android Studio
  • Newer versions of software release faster than the documentation is updated. It often happened that the particular module I learnt had become obsolete for the new version of Android Studio
  • Debugging and re-deploying the app even on the emulator is time-consuming and frustrates you

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I love the idea. I also love that the app is actually on my phone! I honestly feel that I made the most out of the last 24 hours. Circling back, Android Studio's Java is not your regular every day Java.

What I learned

Learnt Android Studio, push notifications, deployment on device and how geo-fencing works! I began with a Unity and VR project and I can totally say that it has caught my interest totally. I'll be looking forward to building a number of VR apps and games moving forward.

What's next for Attempt32

It looks forward to becoming a completely functional app with the push notifications giving a 100% successful response. I will also be making the app more intuitive and integrated with Slack since that's ultra popular among college students. Apart from the push notifications on the app, they will also receive an alert of slack.

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