Inspiration
With almost half of the year gone by with many of us having no choice but to stay at home, the use of social media platforms and online communication has definitely seen an exponential increase. While many of us have a good circle of friends or a helpful community that we can interact with during these trying times, there are many others who don't have the luxury. Maybe they are too shy, or they are going through a lot of stress and are afraid to speak out to others, or they are just really lonely in general, we don't discriminate. So, Ardia was made to help combat this. While it may seem like an ordinary social media platform at first, it is actually more interesting and helpful towards those who are not able to interact or have people to support them (in this case, more emotionally and verbally) as there are no actual users/viewers on that the platform aside from the person who is using it.
We believe that a constant supply of uplifting comments, memes, and _ likes _ on the post will definitely cheer up the main user. Thus, hopefully helping to improve their overall mood, keeping them entertain and increase their confidence and who knows, they may soon get the confidence to open up more to their peers around them and are able to communicate and be more sociable when they are able to get out of the house when the time is right.
Building Process
We decided to use Android Studios to create this application - one of us has had some experience using this software before while one of us did not. So we took a few hours to look through example code and documentation to get a basic foundation of the process of app development using Java in AS. Next, we separated the tasks between us, some of these tasks included:
- login page (linked with Firebase)
- post feed
- generation of comments and likes and messages
- wholesome and cute memes page
We both had to deal with the frontend and backend work for each of our parts and in the end, compile all the code onto one system and debug it.
Challenges
as the two of us were based in two separate countries (UK and Malaysia), it was harder to collaborate and compile the code as we did not have the luxury of being able to just help one another instantaneously due to the lack of each other's in-person's presence.
on the bright side, this does expose us to the world of remote working and it was a good opportunity for catching up.
The implementation of certain aspects of Cloud Firebase onto the system was tricky and required hours of debugging - this was due to the fact that we were relatively new to this service but we managed to pull through in the end
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