UMass Life
Description as a Tweet:
Do you wanna have a brand new Campus App? Do you think the old My UMass app is quite out-of-date? We have the plan, and we have the experiences! If you all like it, we will try our best to bring it to real life.
Inspiration:
When using the My UMass app, I felt really uncomfortable. We have app designing experiences and advanced UI designing experience. Then I came up with an interesting idea about developing that App by ourselves. And then, this group was founded.
What it does:
Our project provides an Android Application for all UMass students to have a better on-campus experience, with the easy-using designing and an advanced User Interface.
The app Umass Life was designed for convenient life experience. It allows us to check out our personal information such as spire ID, class schedule (include details), surrounding dining(upcoming), all activities on campus(upcoming), every place on campus(upcoming), dorm information, roommates, holds on SPIRE, and remaining dining dollars. We combined the features of Umass dining so that it also allows us to check the dining menu from different dining commons and addresses. What's more, we added the function of map searching and marked some important location. We were also planning to combine the features of the bus track. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to finish the whole app in a day but will keep working on it in the future. Finally, students can check the alert announcement and the status of safety through the app for a safe life.
(Everything will come true after getting the API of campus system)
How we built it:
Software: Android Studio.
Language: Java.
API: Google Map SDK
Technologies we used:
- SQL
- Java
Challenges we ran into:
My teammates have never been doing such developing project before, thus It will be a bit hard to lead them in a big project.
Accomplishments we're proud of:
The accomplishments we most proud of are the gorgeous User Interface. We spent a lot of time to judge the choice of layout, the color, and every part of the app. When we look back, we are really proud of what we did. And that's also what we are good at.
What we've learned:
1. How to actually use sophisticated API such as Google Map SDK.
2. How to build the real-time layout by Java instead of assigning it inside the XML.
3. How to better organize the teammates and arranging the tasks.
What's next:
1. Apply for the API of the campus system for the basic information using for App.
2. Finish the pages and functions that we didn't have enough time to do on hackUMass.
Built with:
A combination of Spire / Alert / Map / PVTA / Academic Panel / etc.
Everything for campus life.
Prizes we're going for:
- Best Mobile App