TaskRiver

Inspiration

As an organizer for a previous event similar to KnightHacks, I came upon the challenge of balancing between tabs and different services in my workflow. I would find myself switching between tabs and trying to balance out what I needed to do next. With this problem in mind, we came up with TaskRiver. An app meant to control the flows of your task how you want it when you want it without the added steps of remembering what step to do next or confirming the process guideline to your task.

What it does

TaskRiver allows for a simple streamline process of switching between repetitive tasks easily in one desktop application. The app allows for notes for each flow within your dashboard. If your daily workflow consists of tasks like [Designing a project on a web wireframe, assigning tasks on a project management tool, updating changes on a repo, other repetitive tasks, or streamline tasks on a flow], then TaskRiver is for you. You can design what your flow is and go through your workflow seamlessly.

How we built it

After lots of research, we decided to take the Desktop app route using Electron. We used React and Electron for our clients, Firebase for Identity and Access Management (IAM), MongoDB for data storage, and NodeJS as our runtime environment.

Challenges we ran into

Given that users are able to navigate to different websites from our app(initially a web app), we needed a way for loading websites into a section of our app. We have researched many different technologies for doing that and iframes was one of the solutions. However, we ended up going the desktop route due to many security flaws with iframes. None of us had used Electron before so it was a bit challenging learning and applying that to build our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team collaborated greatly on making this project possible and everyone did their parts which, even though we were using lots of new technologies, allowed us to get to MVP.

What we learned

We've learned how to move away from technologies that we are used to using to more foreign technologies to help us architect a better solution for our users.