The Guelph Seven

Beginning March 5th, 2011, 7 University of Guelph students will take up the challenge to make 7 awesome applications in just one week.

After following the previous Seven Cubed Project, where 7 University of Waterloo students attempted to write an app a day for 7 days, we were inspired to try the experiment for ourselves.

Join us on our adventure!

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Day 2 ended late, and we never got around to posting a retrospective because Day 3 demanded attention.

Day One exposed some flaws in our process, and after a quick discussion about it, we dove right into Day 2’s app.

Brainstorm and Planning

After having spent a day working on a back-end product like Pinchy, we were looking for ideas that didn’t involve creating an API. At the same time, we wanted to make something that would integrate Pinchy and make use of the message sending protocol.

We quickly settled on a bill-splitting app, a service that many on the team wished existed. Specs we quickly established, tasks divided, and we got to coding immediately.

CouchDB

Part of the original plan was to use CouchDB for the backend of the service. Unfortunately, the CouchDB packages for Ubuntu are ridiculously out of date and the documentation could be likened to a bad joke. Couple that with the mind-bending wackiness of couch (something we were originally really interested in figuring out) and you have a blocked project. Around noon, most of the team switched to building a simple MySQL database.

Media Visit

At around noon, Nadia Matos from CTV News dropped by to interview the team. The meeting was arranged hastily; details were finalized in the morning. We were all pretty excited about the visit though, and for the most part we managed to maintain focus and code through the interviews. You can see the aired interview here.

UI Discussions

We had a functional product by the end of the day.  Break A Bill takes in a list of people, a cost, and splits it as desired. The user then has the option of notifying all involved parties by email. We also used some OCR on Android to allow the user to input a bill using their phone’s camera.

Unfortunately, it was raw and unstyled, so we didn’t feel it was worth releasing at that time. We’ve been going back to it during breaks each day, improving both functionality and UI.

You can find Break A Bill’s code at <a href=“http://github.com/guelphseven/day2”>github/day2</a>. The live site is coming soon!

Luke explaining his vision.

Working with Android

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To Candace Sepulis of Ballyhoo Media for designing a totally awesome icon for our Day 2 app, Break A Bill. Your talents are very much appreciated!