JoyJar | Devpost

Inspiration

We all had seen photos of things like memory jars and happy boxes all over our feeds on Instagram and Twitter. However, a tangible way such as those to keep track of our happy moments would be tedious, non-portable, and limited in size. We wanted a simple, convenient way to remember all the good things in our lives.

What it does

JoyJar tracks memories along with their date and a photo. Users provide the memory and photo, the system clock provides the date. This information is displayed conveniently to remind them easily of their happiest times.

Applications in the world

JoyJar can aid in treatment for several psychological and mental disorders, memory-related and emotion-related.

How we built it

Our team built JoyJar in less than 36 hours at MHacks: Refactor. We were all interested in iOS app dev, but had no idea where to start. We started by doing a tutorial that built a single table-view app. We then used our new knowledge of table views and simple view controllers to create a single-page view application with all its private instance data in a Realm mobile database. We did not have access to any advanced graphic design tools, so we designed our program art on a mobile art app called Paper.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was getting ahold of the language and grasping the concept of how the UI elements in the Xcode storyboard interacted and reacted with the code in the supporting .swift files. This was overcome, though with a lot of struggle, with the help of the awesome mentors at MHacks. Another challenge we encountered was a lack of Swift experience and answers on websites such as StackOverflow since it is a fairly new language. A specific technical challenge we ran into was not being able to store user images as instance variables of the Memory objects in a Realm database, since they are not primitive data types in Swift. We solved this problem in our application by first converting the images to NSData to store in the realm, then converting them back to their initial form to display them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we came into our first hackathon without an idea of what to accomplish or what to expect, but came out with a functioning program. Secondly, we are proud that we were persistent and did not get intimidated by the huge amount of new information we had to absorb during the dev process.

What we learned

We learned the basis of a whole new language, but our real gains came elsewhere. We learned how to learn a language. Going through the cycles of failure, trying and retrying, has taught us more than sitting in a comp sci classroom and memorizing a textbook.

What's next for JoyJar

There's definitely many more features and ideas we can envision JoyJar having. Increased functionality and a more robust user experience are our priorities for the next build of JoyJar.