Zuju

• 

  App Icon

• 

  Graph and Data on Main Page

• 

  Academic Articles Page

• 

  Our Inspiration Page

Inspiration

The inspiration for this application came from a growing distaste of being connected. We live in a world where everyone is expected to be connected and reachable at all time, some even leave their phone's volume on at night. This requirement has gone hand-in-hand with our dependency for technology, a self-propagating system where eventually, everyone loses. Technology and software is so prevalent today that companies compete with their algorithms to keep you on their platform longer, perfectly tuned programs made to manipulate you. It has become too easy to get lost in your phone, this virtual world, and forget that a world around you exists. Humans have started to lose their humanity, when do strangers talk to each other anymore? Life is difficult, everyone knows that, and temporarily relieving those pains with technology, effectively forgetting you exist, is an easy way to avoid your problems. Recognizing that your technology consumption could be an addition is the first step, acting on that recognition is the second (and often most difficult). This year at HackUCI, our team wanted to make an application that helps users make this realization, and connect them with relevant information about technology addition.

What it does

Zuju is an application that presents the user's app usage information in a visual and tabled way, making it easy for users to understand where their time might be going. Additionally, we have a page full of fantastic scholarly articles that a user may find useful.

How we built it

Using Android-Studio we had 2 programmers writing the java and xml for this project, whist our 3rd member created some graphics for our application.

Challenges we ran into

Perhaps one of the largest issues one of our programmers faced was with google's latest movements towards user security, thus making it very difficult for apps to obtain permission such as the permissions used in this app. Additionally, one of our programmers had never coded in Android-Studio before, and didn't know any Java. He ended up coding some very advanced methods for having just learned the language. Git destroyed us. Absolutely destroyed. Merge failures, recursive repositories, merge header lines persisting, etc. Our programmers had to spend several hours trying to sort through backups and revert git commits, we're pretty sure their dreams will include git debugging tonight.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super excited that we got around a really tough Android permission, as well as parsing all of that information into something useful! We had never done any graphing before, so the graph in java was a huge achievement. Additionally, our programmers are thrilled about the card view, it turned out to be a huge rabbit hole, but in the end it was worth it.

What we learned

One of our programmers certainly learned a ton of android programming, as well as Java in general. This programmer hopes to take these skills and apply them to other app related projects. Additionally, our other programmer learned how to incorporate views into a layout and use intents to create instances of new browser windows.

Built With

• android-studio