The Motivate App

A Java console application that enables you text motivational messages to your future self to help accomplish your goal!

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Inspiration

We often take on long term goals that require focus, discipline, and staying motivated for an extended period of time. These goals might be things like working out, earning a graduate degree, or eating healthy. The hardest part of accomplishing these goals is staying diligent and motivated until completion, often weeks or months down the line. We can paste a motivational quote in our rooms or smartphone background to keep ourselves on track, but static reminders such as these often become boring to look at over time, and we grow numb to what made that specific message so motivational to us in the first place. This experience inspired us to design an app that keeps the motivation customized and fresh and keeps you motivated until you accomplish your long term goal.

What it does

Here enters the Motivate App. It keeps you motivated by sending you customized and fresh motivation messages to your future self and help you accomplish your long term goals.

  1. To set it up, you would enter your goal, start date, end date, frequency to receive the text messages, and motivational messages you would want to send to your future self. After you are done, hit submit.
  2. You can then expect to get a welcome message. Your motivational messages will come at a random time during the day at a frequency you desire (eg. twice a day, once a day, every other day, and once a week). You will only receive one motivational text each time.

For example, if your goal is to get fit over the next two months, you would set the start and end date of your goal, and then craft a set of messages for yourself that you know will motivate you to stay on track. These might be things like a message about how you want to be in good enough shape to run that 10k in two months with your friends, or maybe a link to an inspirational video or song. Then, just look forward to messages that will arrive at random times, via text message to your phone, so that you get fresh and unique motivational messages to help you stay focused on the journey to success.

How we built it

We used JavaFX to build the interface/GUI, Java to build the backend, and Twilio libraries to enable texting.

Challenges we ran into

  1. The first challenge was how to define the scope of the app so that it's accomplishable in a week but also has useful functions.
  2. The second was how to build a texting function into the app.
  3. The third was how to work with time, as the app needs to send a message at a random time during the day at the user's chosen frequency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We were able to build a texting feature in the app.
  2. We were able to ask the app to send randomized messages within our desired time window at the user's chosen frequency.
  3. We successfully implemented multiple threads to allow for time-released messages.
  4. Great teamwork between front end and back end!

What we learned

  1. We learned how to use Twilio API to build a texting feature.
  2. We learned a lot more about JavaFX methods for formatting and actions.
  3. We didn't know each other before this project. We learned how to work as a team in a short period of time and deliver the project before the deadline.

What's next for The Motivate App

  1. At the moment the app only texts words. We plan to allow pictures, gifs, and videos to be texted as well, so the user can be more visually motivated.
  2. We'd love to have it hosted on the web using AWS.

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