Darcy's World Domination: Shar-Animals

Darcy's World Domination Hacktastic Spectacular

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this app came from our appreciation for our local computing society mascot, Darcy Rooster, and a common love of wildlife. We saw an opportunity for an improvement within the wild animal spotting community. With a single, easy-to-use iOS application, users will be able to efficiently and effectively organise wildlife images into a collection, allowing the user to easily share images, and also gain more knowledge about the wildlife in a selected image. Another positive outcome we saw, the app could collect data for researchers. They would be able to make uses of the possibly large data set by accessing and downloading from the site in hopes of assisting in research.

Research theme

Creative, cultural and social benefits will be achieved by the mobile app through promoting tourism and wildlife. Sharing data, knowledge and decisions research is achieved through our website and app collecting data storing in a database and making it publicly available.

What it does

This is done through having two core parts to the project, the iOS application and the website.

  1. The iOS application provides the core function to our large demographic market segments which consists of tourists and wildlife enthusiasts. This application is the way in which users collect, share and gain more information to educate themselves and others about the wildlife that they are finding at their particular locations. This is done by the users opening the application and they are given a menu screen in which they have two options. The first is "View Collection," this view takes them to a collection or gallery of images. This has the ability to filter or share selected images to others. Selecting a single image itself from the view will take you to the photo screen that will show you a full screen view of the image and more information about about the animal that has been found in the image. The second is "Add a Photo" which will have a pop-up window that will allow either a selected pre-existing image from the gallery or to take a new photo.

  2. The Website provides the core information for our second target market (researchers), who may be interested in accessing the information that is collected and stored by the iOS application through a downloadable file to access the open source database.

How we built it

  • The iOS application was made using SWIFT
  • The website HTML, PHP, CSS, MYSQL (for database integration)
  • The database is MYSQL

The business model canvas

Can be found here

The Value proposition canvas

Can be found here

Challenges we ran into

  • Brendan: Time limits.
  • Majid: First time doing PHP.
  • Daniel: Getting a mobile app to communicate with a server/database.
  • Shannon: Having seen or heard of a BMC or VPC before.
  • Bridgette: Taking on the challenge of the business side.
  • Sarah: The learning curve.
  • Grant: The learning cliff.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Brendan: Getting everything we wanted to get done in the app done.
  • Majid: Managing to export a database in a CSV file.
  • Daniel: I had a good time working through the problem and am pleased with the end result.
  • Shannon: Getting the non technical side of the project done with a small portion of the project team.
  • Bridgette: I am really happy with what as a team we have accomplished.
  • Sarah: Conquering Adobe Illustrator and contributing cute graphics.
  • Grant: Building a GUI on a language i've never used until UHack.

What we learned

  • Brendan: Better management of team during hackathons.
  • Majid: That i can really achieve more then I thought I could in language.
  • Daniel: I've learned how swift communicates with server-side scripting languages.
  • Shannon: I've learned more about business model canvas, and value proposition canvas.
  • Bridgette: A lot about about business model canvas.
  • Sarah: I've learned how to balance my skills on a team and that there can never be too much pizza.
  • Grant: How to effectively manage time and work in a team environment.

The goal

A seamless application that connects users with educators' information about any animals they've just taken a picture of and to enhance their ability to share fun, warm memories of Australian wildlife.

Value for consumer

  • Fun
  • Convenience
  • Education
  • Ease of use
  • Mobility

Value for us

  • Make useful data
  • Create marketing tool
  • User generated data

What is it?

  • Mobile app
  • Back-end database for sharing data
  • Website download tool
  • Ability to take photos
  • Store data associated with photos
  • Sharing content

The Pitch Video

On YouTube

Facebook

Darcy Rooster Facebook account

Twitter

Darcy Rooster Twitter

What's next for uHack

SLEEP :D

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