Notos

Inspiration

Everyone has their own task manager software, whether that be Notion, Trello, or even Google Calendar—all to sort and track goals, deadlines, and habits. Our team uses no shortage of different softwares, all to record various importances. We find that a lot of software likes to be an “all-in-one”, which often requires a touch of finesse just to write something down. Instead, we wanted to tone things back a touch and create something intuitive and simple—something that makes it easy to spot the most pressing and urgent problems at hand.

What it does

Notos is a task manager where all your tasks are hot-air balloons! A task can be created with the click of a button, represented as a colorful flying bubble. It floats higher the closer it is to their deadline. Watch them soar beyond as you complete them or wipe them away with a quick pop!

How we built it

Notos is a full-stack development. The database utilizes Supabase, which stores each user and their respective tasks. Authentication is tied to Auth0, which is interconnected with it. The backend is built upon typescript with Node.js being our runtime environment. The frontend uses React, which features all the animation. Each team member worked on one of the three features (database, backend, frontend), before merging individual work together to create an integrated product.

Challenges we ran into

All of us each ran into our own individual problems. While we did come into this hackathon with a little bit of experience in each of our respective roles, there was a huge initial hurdle that we faced. The mentors were really useful with providing specific advice on implementation and debugging, which made this process manageable. Another large challenge we faced was integrating our work together, which was a whole mess all on its own. There were definitely times our buttons were pressed, and we stumbled quite a bit until we really got our footing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making it this far. In all seriousness, our group came with little idea of what to expect, and we kept our expectations low. We knew there would be plenty of challenges, and we definitely faced quite a few. But from the little things like the integration of Auth0 and Supabase to the silly animations of the completed tasks, we’re proud of the work we did.

What we learned

None of our group was entirely confident in the programming of web development, particularly in the front-end. We purposely tried to set our goals to create an achievable minimum viable product, and even then, we underestimated the number of times we would stumble. With the benefit of hindsight, we realized our planning could have been a little better—a lot of things could've been better. But beyond all, we’re glad we stepped up to the challenge, and we had a blast doing it. It’s truly in an environment as conductive as this where we were encouraged to persevere and keep going, and that supporting each other is how we can keep ourselves going; not just between teammates, but as a community.

What's next for Notos

The team had a lot of ideas that wanted to be implemented but were limited due to a lack of time. One idea the team had was to create “bundles” of balloons—a method of sorting tasks by a category. Visually, they would look like all the balloons from the movie “Up”. Another gripe with task managing softwares is how troublesome it can be to find the tab of all your todos, so the team wanted to create an extension that authenticates to show the most prevalent of the bunch.