MEGANNE JIMENEZ

ITERATION 2: EXPLORE PHASE

• Goals

  • One goal this time around was to decide our MVP, so we had a talk with our sponsors to figure that out. We're deciding to still include the front end portion of the website (we don't think that's going to take very long), but that still might be something we take out.

  • One of our big goals was to move all of our files to be locally on our computers. 

  • We also wanted to make sure that we could implement some sort of video and audio component into the app, which would depend on the database.

  • Another big goal (which was decided a week into the explore phase, after we got another round of feedback) was to implement some sort of navigation/organization to make the app flow better.

  • Our last goal was to at least get started with firebase (initialize things, etc, just because we knew we would be spending so much more time on designing those extra screens for navigation).

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• Time Spent

  • The first week, we definitely spent most of it planning out the navigation and talking to our sponsors about it. We created a Figma prototype so that we could show our sponsors what kind of ideas we had in terms of organization/navigation. Making the figma probably took around 6 hours because we made it, got feedback from Aileen, altered it, and then made some final tweaks before showing our sponsors (counting the ~1 hour we spend talking to sponsors).

  • The other time (6+ hours) was spent moving our files to our computers, which took very long, because we ran into a lot of issues that we weren't seeing before. We had to install cocopods, and then homebrew, but we only figured that out because of troubleshooting/googling. I had to go into the App.js file and start combining all of our snack files from the online expo editor and made sure those were all navigable and accessible. This also took some troubleshooting because sometimes the errors aren't that clear, or I had to completely restart the app in order for something to work.

  • The second week I knew I wanted to work on adding the additional screens that we decided on with our sponsors, so I implemented those, which includes a project page, list of interview page, new interview, new recording, etc. I don't know why but it was very difficult to create those lists of items, and then I realized that I needed to make them clickable/touchable, so I had to go in and change them again, so that was probably my biggest struggle with the new screens. I also tried to create add buttons in the right header, but it seemed impossible to make them navigate to another page, so I improvised with that component. This took a good amount of work, which was ~8 hours.

  • Then I needed to keep working on the audio, which I got to work, finally. I also coded in a play button that only shows when there is a recording to play, which was difficult because I wasn't really sure how conditionals/setState()'s worked in javascript, because the syntax is super weird, so I learned that, too. It doesn't look very pretty, but for now it stores the file locally. This took ~3 hours this time around.

  • Lastly I worked on getting Firebase started up. We knew our priority would change with this since we decided to design a new flow and create more screens, so ultimately we just wanted to get things set up. So I set up the Firebase on both the IOS and Android, which involved a lot of copying and pasting into randomly located files to get everything to run again. I started the storage on the IOS side, but ran into a little roadblock that I haven't been able to get past. But I think I still got done what we set out to do, which was to initialize the Firebase once we had time. I spent about 3 hours setting everything up, including the XCode download (which took forever).

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• Deliverables​​

  • Figma prototype (showed to sponsors)

  • App.js

  • Screen Recording

  • Soapbox Firebase