Hypercron

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  Showing what the overlay looks like

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  Showing project properties

Inspiration

I started growing a mustache and wished I had a good way to track my progress through photos in a way I could do a time-lapse video. My brother and I looked for apps that would help photograph progress, but everything we found appeared to be little niche social networks for posting photos of workouts. When we came here, we brought it as an idea and decided to run with it.

What it does

For each project you start (growing a mustache, getting six-pack abs, etc.), the most recent photo you took overlays the camera feed so you can line your shots up consistently. The photos are stored grouped by project, so even if you don't use the sharing features to come, you have easy access to the photos to do your own thing with them.

How I built it

My brother is working on the iPhone version, but here's how the Android process went for me: I started with getting the camera feed to display, then added capture/saving. Putting the previous photo over the feed was then fairly simple. Most of my time went into the project structure/display.

Challenges I ran into

I've never successfully used swipe paging in Android (I looked at it when I first started Android, but that was it). So there was a lot of stuff going on there I didn't understand. There were several things that the internet said should work but weren't. I tend to have problems no one else has. For example, the fragments weren't returning their views for me to put the image overlay in. That's why I have maintained references to the ImageViews for the different pages and have a problem with using too much memory (though I think there's another problem there somewhere). I also don't have the fragments immediately updating their titles when you change the name of the project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I feel like I was able to get things done with the app much quicker than I expected to be able to. And I love the way I have creating a new project set up. You just swipe all the way over and start taking pictures.

What I learned

Other than a crash course in fragments and such, I think I learned more in the Java mindset than the styles I have used in other programming languages.

What's next for Hypercron

Design. It'll eventually look good. Also, the big point in my vision that I didn't get to was the ability to set up reminders so that if for any reason I wanted to take a picture of my elbow every morning at 5:43 I would get a reminder I could tap on that would open to that specific project, let me take the picture, and close without a lot of unnecessary tapping. Because progress should be lazy.

Built With

• android
• android-studio