mag.net

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  Images of the app in workspace

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  App Images pt. 1

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  App Images pt. 2

Inspiration

We found that there are a lot of networking apps in the market, but not many are designed with women in mind, especially in technology fields. We wanted to come up with a solution that created a safe and accessible space for women and non-binary identifying people to network and build up a community.

What it does

mag.net has 3 main components: build a community, foster connections, and create networking opportunities. It allows a user to log in and add profile information, which would be used to match a user with others of similar interests. The app's layout was designed with a mentor-mentee relationship in mind to provide a support system for those who use our app. It also has a map feature that lets you see where your friends are to make in-person meet-ups easy. There is also a mock-up for an explore page for finding opportunities.

How we built it

mag.net was created with Swift Storyboard and we used Firebase to store a database for user information. Assets in the app and all animations and graphics were created by us using Procreate.

Challenges we ran into

Firebase was a significant challenge to work with because most of the documentation and tutorials that surrounded it were outdated. Specifically, we had issues with connecting the Firebase database to the Swift project because of issues with outdated pod commands and this required extensive research through StackOverflow in order to complete the task but we were ultimately able overcome this. Furthermore, we had issues with accessing data from the backend and were not able to properly sync the real-time database with the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For a lot of us, this was our first time working with swift and mobile app development. We are proud that we were able to design and implement the basic structure of our networking app within 24 hours during this Hackathon. It was a large scale application with many features that required grueling efforts to complete.

What we learned

We learned how to use Swift and do basic mobile application development. We worked with both the frontend and the backend, which is the full functionality and purpose of a mobile application. Understanding how both of these features work made us better computer scientists and is the foundation for our understanding in this part of computer science. We also had to work as a team, which is something we had not done before in terms of programming. We had to share files and learn to be patient with each other through the stressful process of programming.

What's next for mag.net

We want to focus on implementing the chat feature and retrieving data from the Firebase backend. This will help us build the chat, display select profile information to all users and further the functionality of the application.

Built With

• firebase
• procreate
• swift
• xcode