Troublesome client

My team and I are working with HunQRy which is a startup. Initially I thought there r graduates but found out that they r just students. I always have the bad thought of working with business student that doesnt know a thing about the tech. They wouldn’t appreciate or understand that amount of effort we need to develop the application.

Firstly they wanted to develop a dine in expedience with QR scanner so everyone can  view n order food from menu from their own phone instead of single ipad. Then they suddenly think that the singapore market is not ready for QR scanner n wanted to change to a take away experience instead. Since we already finish developing the feature, we told them the take away could be an add on instead. So after finish implementing the takeaway they suggested that they want to pivot the app to specialized more coffee customization. After a long discussion, we decided that was too much of a change from the original direction and rejected their idea and proceed with just dine in n take away for general restaurants.

This shows that they are really indecisive and lack of experience to set a clear direction in their startup. I really think that student startup are not suitable to be cs3216 client as we r working for them for free and they are just using us to try stuff out.

 

Material UI Beta

I have learn a very important lesson by using Material UI Beta, never use a beta version. Well when i started working on the project, my teammate already installed n used material UI beta version on 3 pages. So i decided to just use the beta version instead of the stable version. Initially I was though beta version should be fine as long as there is the api document but i was wrong. Whenever there is an issue that I am struggling, I cant find any solution or references online to solve my problem because the beta version made an overhaul of the API. I dont know why my teammate want to use the beta version instead of the stable one, but I will never touch a beta version again, ever.

final assignment progress

I was tasked to handle the front end using react. However, I was doing backend for assignment 1 and 2, so I had to learn everything from scratch as soon as possible so I can start working on the project.

Meeting with hunQRy client

Last week my cs3216 met our client HunQry which is a startup that want to make a restaurant app with QR code scanner so everyone can use their phone to order instead of just 1 IPAD. Apparently they are just student like us that are still studying in NUS so they are relying on getting a grant to pay us. However they look like nice persons so I cant wait to work with them!

Done with assignment 3!

Just submitted assignment 3 yesterday and I was so exhausted that i slept for 12 hours! There were a few problems that keep causing us issue like the google map geolocation quota. Our front end will keep find all the events within the user radius, so every event will result in 1 call to the google distance matrix API. Futhurmore, the front end will keep refreshing the page, thus calling the api a few times. This has causes us to keep hitting the google distance matrix api limit easily, I had to create 3 google account to get 3 key to swap them out when 1 of them hit the limit. Finally we found a better solution which is to calculate the distance ourself! We looked for the formula to calculate the distance with latitude and longitude and it works perfectly!

Assignment 1 marks are out!

My team got 64 marks with is around the mean of the class. Honestly I was quite satisfied  with the marks as this is my first time doing web development. I spent a lot of time to learn the backend stuff like nodejs n sequelize but I find it very satifying to be able to launch a product out in the world for others to use. I also noticed that the report itself is more important than the product that is being developed and we should have spent more time on it.

Internal Pitching

Out of all the pitches, the 1 I found most interested is the HunQry. For a restaurant to implement a menu on ipad they need to hire a team to develop the app that would cost sum of money, so what if there is an app that can make that? It solves the problem and it is a very interesting product to work on. The prodcut owner also looks quite supportive! I hope that I can find a team to work on it.

Snap & Eat presentation

Snap and Eat is a food image recognition application which is tied up with a campaign from Health Promotion Board to promote eating healthy. User can earn point for the campaign to get rewards.

Summary of the presentation

Malfunction of main feature

The main features which is the food image recognition is not even working properly. Although there is still the barcode scanning, the food database is too small and it often doesn’t have any match. Most of the time, the user has to key in the food’s nutrition which is quite a hassle.

Poor UI and maintenance

This app has poor UI and maintenance as presented, the most obvious 1 is the blue sub header is much bigger than the orange main header. The bottom navigation bar also has too many options, which require the user to scroll. There is even broken UI like miskicking of buttons and scrollable contents that can’t be scrolled. Although the Health Promotion Board event has ended, the event is still visible in the app and this shows that the developer has abandoned the app.

Business Limitations

This app is tied to Health Promotion Board whose primary goal is not to make profit but to promote their campaign and it is very unlikely that they will use ads to monetize the app. Even if we consider this app without the HPB, there will even be less user as there are tons of competitors like which has way more accurate food recognition.

 

Personal Opinion

Personally, I think it is a very useful app especially for people that are obsessed with tracking calories like bodybuilders or someone who is trying to lose weight. Tracking calories is always a hassle especially when you have to look up the nutrition info of every food u eat or even weigh the food. This app solves this problem and allows the user to snap the food they eat and automatically calculate its nutrient. Then the user can even see the total calorie intake for the day and determine if it meets their goal. It is the perfect idea for that solves the problem.

However, after downloading the app and tried it for myself, the food recognition is very bad and almost never work at all even on obvious fruits like banana and apple. Even the barcode does not work all the time as their database is quite small. So, there is actually no use for this app since it can’t solve the problem that it was created for. The user still has to write down the nutrition and this app just serve as a log to record the food intake.

The only upside I can think of is the camera button to take a snap of the food is pretty flashed out and obvious to the user.

In conclusion, I won’t even recommend this app to any of my friends as there are better alternative solution like foodai which has a robust food image recognition.

UI Presentation

The talk by suyuen was very helpful, exxpecially when she recommend us to use a template instead of writing the whole front end from scratch. It gave me some insight on how the current industry works. I also downloaded some template and was quite surprised at the quality. There are well polished and professional. I also took a look at the backend and picked up some skills like how well they managed the whole architecture for such a complicated system. I am very grateful for suyuen for giving us the insights of how things work.

 

CS3216 Week 2

This week’s lecture was on scrum. Although I have already been through scrum for 3 projects but I still find the presentation quite interesting. He used a more pratical approach to teach scrum and I can relate it very well.

After the lecture, me and my assignment 1 teamate sat down and try to come out with ideas for assignment 1.  We came out with some silly ideas like virtual fidget spinner that allows the user to attach ur facebook fren’s picture on it to spin. I also suggested that we could make a IFG Betting system for nus students that isnt competing to participate as well. There is also 8 days left for IFG after the assignment 1 deadline for users to play with it. Unfortunately, my teamates very reluctant to take the risk(law) to develop it, so we ended up with doing a website called NUSReviews. Personally I think it is not very useful as NUSMod already has the feature. Thus, we have to come out with more ideas to distinguish it from NUSMod and one of it will be searching modules by module rating.