TimeBank

BiolaHacks 2017 Repository

Inspiration

We felt drawn to the concept of time management as a problem fairly early on. On surveying both the Android and Apple app stores, we decided that the apps we saw there were few and/ or lacking, and thus set out to improve on the concepts we observed, such as locking the user out of certain or all apps, and allowing them to set goals for themselves and be motivated to achieve them.

What it Does

The app maintains a timer to monitor screen time on the phone, and asks the user to set an hour of day and a time limit for their usage during the day. If they go over that limit, their phone will lock down all installed apps not whitelisted within settings.

Build Process

We used Android Studio for development and GitHub for version control between team members. Using an alternative to Android activities called "states," we able to streamline multiple app functionalities on the fly, even though our app isn't that hardware intensive in of itself.

Challenges

We faced a lot of difficulty on this project. Only one team member had nearly any Android Studio experience, and this showed in our team's efficiency. All members are also first-years at Biola, with very limited coding experience to begin with, and no previous hackathon experience at all.

Accomplishments

While our app isn't fully functional, and not nearly to the level of completion we were hoping for, we absolutely learned a lot in terms of Android development! We completed most of the back-end development, and have the effective framework of the entire application, although we lack some key features we desired at the beginning.

Things we Learned

Android development is hard. Time management is also absolutely crucial in projects like this, as well as attempting goals that are attainable. Practically, we learned a lot about Android development that was far out of our depth as we started this project, including data and graphics management. We also experimented with an alternate means of controling app behavior than activities, called states, and found it had both upsides and downsides. This is on top of becoming much more familiar with git, GitHub, and the Android Studio development environment itself.