App Studio: Entry 2

Speculate phase

Prioritized feature list

  • Time tracking via data access
    • A functional view of the user’s data usage
  • Allow user to create events
    • Check-ins after events to see if user accomplished the event
  • Track Data
    • Store data

Tools needed

  • Illustrator
  • AdobeXD
  • React Native

Things needed to implement features

  • Request app permissions
  • Set default apps
  • Store data
  • Load data

I have decided to use AdobeXD for the prototyping and Adobe Illustrator for any necessary graphics. I think this should only take a few hours at most.

For the actual programming, I am planning on using React Native. This may present some problems with accessing and writing data, as well as data tracking but this should possible given Facebook’s usage of React Native and it’s wide sweeping tracking. I have some previous experience with JavaScript so hopefully, React is not too hard to learn. Additionally, this will require learning Expo, which should not take as long.

The individual features for the minimally viable product should not take as long as there will be minimal data processing.

  • Data Tracking

Data tracking and getting running apps looks fairly easy from this StackOverflow post. However, I would have to either run the app at all times in the background or extract all the data from one of Google’s apps that track it which may be easier.

  • Event creating and puching to Google calendars

As I have an Android, I will be using Google calendar for this first iteration and may add more calendars as necessary. The Google Calendar API is fairly easy to use but most phone’s also have an internal calendar, though it appears to be written similarly to Google Calendar API.

  • Data Storage

This may not be as necessary on the first iteration as there will not be as much data processing when displaying the user’s data usage and how accurately they stuck to their calendar. It will be more important when the data is then used to improve the user’s habits as processing the data on each start up may be more than the phone can handle.