QuickRun

Never get bored of your daily runs or walks again!

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QuickRun is a cross-platform mobile app that generates a new route to run, walk, or cycle! It provides an interesting way to stay active and never get bored of running on the same route every time. Tired of walking alone? QuickRun also has a Community feature that allows you to meet up with other users going on a similar path as you. Make exercising more fun by trying QuickRun today!

Inspiration

Ever since COVID-19 began, we've all been stuck inside our houses more than ever. During lockdown, we found ourselves going on daily walks to get a breath of fresh air and some movement. However, after a while, we began to crave a change of scenery and we get bored of our neighbourhoods. We created QuickRun as a solution to generate different routes and to find walking buddies for when you want some company.

What it does

The user selects their activity for the day (ie. Walking, Running, Cycling), the distance or time they'd like to be exercising for, and whether they'd like to exercise alone or with others. After the user has finished their selections, QuickRun will randomly generate a route for them. If the user likes the generated route, they can press play and activate GPS directions, or they can shuffle and generate a new route. The user can also save routes for future access if they wish to repeat the route for another day.

How we built it

For the design, we used Figma to create a layout and prototype for our application. When implementing the front end, we used Flutter, XCode, and Android Studio to create our app screens and features. To implement the backend, we used Node.js/Express.js, Firebase and the Google Maps Directions API. The frontend communicates with the backend via RESTful APIs.

Challenges we ran into

All of us were challenged and learned a lot during this hackathon. We were all new to the technologies we used to implement our app, and we had a big learning curve to get over. Our team came from all different backgrounds, but we managed to work together to create an awesome finished product.

  • Karan: first time hacker, created a UI design and prototype on Figma for the first time, had to restart interactions on Figma prototype after accidental deletion
  • Nika: beginner knowledge in Flutter, ran into various formatting and layout errors while coding the front end, took a while to understand how to navigate between screens on Flutter, fixed formatting issues through trial and error, lots of youtube and stack overflow and HTN mentors
  • Noah: never used Flutter before, had trouble figuring out how to render roots from Flutter to Google Maps view, solved by rendering backend with HTML and sent that to Flutter via iFrame, first time creating RESTful APIs
  • Michael: I worked on the backend, and before this have never worked with node.js, or really javascript. Reworking our pathing algorithm after learning more about the Maps API also took a lot of thinking.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our finished product! We are so happy that we were able to actually convert our idea into an actual application. We are also very proud of how we were able to overcome our challenges and learn new technologies in such a short amount of time especially, in successfully using the Google Maps API to generate a route.

What we learned

So much! Each and every one of us learned something new this hackathon. All of us worked with technologies we weren't very familiar with and we managed to successfully cooperate to create QuickRun in such a short span of time. (See Challenges above for a overview of what we used)

What's next for QuickRun

We have lots of plans for the next features of QuickRun! We'd love to enhance our community feature by allowing users to create Public Community Events in order to organize group walks, runs and biking. Also, we'd like to create challenges and leaderboards to participate alongside friends and develop healthy daily habits.

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