Flicks

Inspiration

We all know that this generation is hopeless -- human attention spans being reduced to shorter than a goldfish and being chronically online, leaning towards digital interactions over real-life socialization. When we saw the theme of bringing people closer together, what better way to solve this than by developing a Tinder x TikTok dating app, a place where people can express themselves through short-form video content (the only media people consume nowadays) and match with others who share the same interests! By combining TikTok’s addicting short-form content and Tinder’s matching algorithm, we would be able to address this generation’s waning attention spans while uniting all the single and desperate Gen Z’s together.

Development Process

After coming up with our initial ideas, we immediately got to work using React Native and APIs from Supabase and AWS. We went from trying to set things up, learning React Native from scratch, asking 3 different AI bots to tell us what’s wrong with our code, and restarting over again because it just doesn’t work out, it’s impressive that we haven’t lost our minds yet during this whole week -- though we did lose hair and lose sleep. We also tried implementing algorithms from dating apps and video scrolling apps such as TikTok to combine them together.

Why our project is innovative/creative

Our project is innovative since it creates a new, modern version of dating apps where the main focus is short form content instead of still pictures. It combines the hit apps TikTok and Tinder efficiently, a platform to share engaging videos and connect with others easier. This makes our app a more interactive platform where users can showcase their personalities and interests through video rather than just static images. By integrating something similar into a dating app, users will be able to see more relevant profiles & content, which will provide an engaging experience specially made for this generation.

Technical implementation of our project

We used React Native as our main language to develop the mobile app, as well as Supabase for the database to store and manage all data as well as providing an API to retrieve information such as the videos, profile picture, name, and description. Since it’s inefficient to store videos in a database, we used AWS S3 to store and manage videos, then generate a video URL to be sent to the database. We also used Clerk as our method of authentication, allowing simple sign in by linking with the user’s google account.

Roles in our team

All three members of our team were first year first semester, and had absolutely no coding background before coming to Melbourne a month ago, so one could imagine how tough it was creating a whole functional application while still learning how to print ‘Hello World’ in class. We needed a game plan -- Angel as lead designer, Karen as frontend developer and Jordan as the backend developer. It was definitely an arduous challenge, but extremely rewarding from a learning perspective since this was our first ever hackathon. After going through 10 different tutorials and hours worth of debugging stupid errors, we managed to combine our code together with enough teamwork and pizza!