Nostalgia

Inspiration

The theme of the hackathon, which is to celebrate friendship day, inspired us to create our app. We also drew inspiration from the experience of one of our team members; only being able to meet up with their friend group once a year. To keep in touch with one another and share our memories throughout the year, without having to meet up physically, we can build a collaborative scrapbook group to view our friends' scrapbooks and get a view into their lives.

What it does

Our intention was to allow users to create multiple groups with other users such as friends and family to collaborate on making a scrapbook over a shared event or memory. Although it doesn’t necessarily have to be a shared event, it is a way to share our lives with one another. With what we have created currently, users can make a new one page scrapbook, and save it to edit and access it later at the main page. When decorating your scrapbook there are options to upload photos, draw and write text on the page.

How we built it

We built our project using CockroachDB, JS, HTML, CSS/Bootstrap, Node.js, Fabric.js and Express. Fabric.js was used to create a customizable scrapbook page that allows users to have multiple ways to stylize the page (eg. uploading pictures, drawing, text). JS, HTML, CSS and Bootstrap were used to style our app. CockroachDB was used to store the scrapbook titles, time the scrapbook was created as well as the design users made on the canvas/scrapbook by converting it to JSON data and storing it in a table. Node.js was used to run our server. Express was used to simplify the process of differentiating between GET, POST, and PUT requests so that the correct queries to CockroachDB could be executed.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding how to use Fabric.js to make the scrapbook customizable. We had difficulty learning about the canvas HTML tag and how to convert it into JSON so it could be stored in the database
Figuring out how to use Express and CockroachDB to store and retrieve information through queries and requests
Making a phone app instead of a website or another application that we were used to creating
Breaking up a multiple part project into small digestible tasks

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First hackathon for two of our team members 🎉🎉!!
Exploring the world of design through a simple application like PowerPoint to create and design prototypes to better understand how to build and develop the app.
Successfully storing and retrieving information from the database to dynamically create pages from the data stored.
Being able to create a cool customizable scrapbooking app through Fabric.js and storing that design as JSON data in an SQL database (which we didn’t know was possible till we tried it out!)

What we learned

Learning how to insert and query data from CockroachDB and SQL databases as it was our first time using Postgresql and using SQL combined with Node.js.
Reading documentation and understanding how to build off examples as we used both Fabric.js and CockroachDB for the first time.
A more comprehensive understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript for some of our members and learning more aspects about the language.
How to relate with new people (communication skills) and collaboration on a group project while making new friendships along the way!

What's next for Nostalgia

Each friend group has a different “vibe” so we plan to allow for easier collaboration and compartamalization by implementing profiles and a “friending” system. This will allow for scrapbooks with certain moments that correspond to a various friend/family group to only be shared with them.
It’s more fun with more collaboration so we hope to implement a “google document style” of collaboration to allow multiple people to edit the scrapbooks at once.
To make the scrapbooks more fun and enjoyable, we plan to add more customizable options such as different pen colours, different fonts as well as premade stickers.
Incorporating an algorithm to analyze a group of pictures that a user uploads beforehand so the app can give the user recommendations on stickers, colours and themes for their scrapbook.