MindGrid

MindGrid is a intuitive productivity software that allows you to manage tools dynamically, all in one grid. With calendars, object detection, and a virtual pet, it truly increases productivity.

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Inspiration

Our team shares a common love for organization, but often find the tools that help us be most productive are spread across multiple applications (e.g. Google Calendar, Notes app for to-do, Spotify for vibing to music) which is inconvenient. This inspired us to envision a place where users could organize their lives into tabs and widgets, an all-in-one display for users to customize their mind onto a canvas for them to design as they choose.

What it does

MindGrid is a personalized widget-based productivity app which is a clean and aesthetic way to manage one’s personal life, whether academic or otherwise. The app features a library of widgets as well as a lightweight version of google docs and google calendar. The idea is in the future to expand the library of widgets and enable compatibility with softwares like the google suite, Notion, etc, in order to create the ultimate all-in-one life app which helps manage one’s relation with all the technologies used.

How we built it

We used the NextJS framework as our frontend to display our site and the Backend as a Service firebase, which allowed us to save widget layouts and can be accessed on any device anywhere. We also utilized the chrome extension framework CRXJS and used firebase realtime features to bridge the gap between NextJS and the extension to track tab activity data. In terms of teamwork and cooperation, we used GitHub and had to commit and fetch and resolve many merge conflicts!

Challenges we ran into

Each of our teammates faced a considerable challenge in our coding process ranging from technical issues early in the development phase to fundamental issues with the code. For starters, learning how to use Roboflow and compensate for the lack of Javascript support and documentation was incredibly difficult as well as optimizing and refining the workflows. Moreover, prioritizing UI/UX was difficult as functionality was being built alongside t

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the time limit, the basic interface of the application is neat and aesthetically pleasing. We were able to complete most of our minimal viable product and it is a functional product. While working on this project, we used Roboflow for the first time and were able to successfully implement object detection. It was a challenging experience having to learn a new computer vision model in a short amount of time, but it was an enriching experience.

What we learned

As mentioned below, we learned how to use the Roboflow platform for object detection, this is something we can use for future projects. In general, we learned more about how to code in html and css for our front-end developers. We also learned the importance of communication while coding, as we had to prevent merge conflicts while coding on github. We all have a strong coding background, but issues between saving the code resulted in our project taking longer than expected. The time limit for this Hackathon taught us the importance of planning a timeline ahead of time before working on our idea. Near the end we had to rush aspects because we didn’t fully consider the time they would take, however overall we are proud of how much we completed in the time.

What's next for MindGrid

The possibilities of MindGrind are almost endless and there are several ways we could add to and improve the platform. Some major ideas we brainstormed were:

  • Adding more widgets such as finance trackers, task managers, and media players other than music to make the platform even more versatile.
  • Connecting seamlessly with productivity ecosystems like Google Suite, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to reduce app-switching
  • Improve on our object detection by adding smart tagging, context-based recommendations, AI-driven organization of notes and tasks, and a feature to track workouts
  • Developing mobile and desktop apps for a smooth experience across devices.
  • Introducing real-time collaboration, shared dashboards, and version tracking to make MindGrid a team-friendly tool.
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