Updates
Our progress hasn't always been fast! But we're excited to keep you in the loop with what has been going on.
Weeks 20 - 22
The final push for the product has occurred. We've done amazing, and managed to introduce serverless functions to the website to make it fit GDPR regulations and also moderate swearing etc - this could be good to talk about since privacy was spoken about multiple times on the course.
We've managed to get the pages for the keyboard up and running - these include some demo keys, so we can go through this in the presentation - at a later date, it could be possible to expand these.
The keyboard was released onto the google play store, and the website was published online.
We then had to do a demonstration to other students, explaining our product - what we thought it solved, how it solved it and what technologies were used.
It was also interesting to see some of the other teams' products - a lot of creativity on show.
Finally, we did a presentation on our product - gaining very high marks.
Individually, we all will evaluate of we found the performance of our team, and what we think collectively, and personally we could have done better. However, on the surface, everyone seems happy with the result of the project, and are proud of what we've achieved.
Weeks 17 - 19
The keyboard is now almost fully functional, with features such as the app layout upon download being focused on.
The website is still in the works. Some bugs to do with the dark mode and languages have been looked at.
Worryingly time is marching on and there's still lots to do, with many deadlines coming up in the next few weeks.
George will continue to do the website and some of the app development, while other members of the team will look into other features of the keyboard.
Weeks 13 - 16
The keyboard is progressing well, and the website is progressing even better!
It's beginning to have features such as the ability to add feedback which wasn't initially planned for.
The current focus is trying to align the concepts so that there's consistency between the two parts of the app.
Also - we've decided upon a name: Symput!
Weeks 11 - 12
We wrapped up the semester evaluating the progress we've made.
The progress in the past few weeks was slower, due to the numerous deadlines from other courses people were understandably prioritising.
Nevertheless, we've managed to find a keyboard that does a similar thing to what we need. Finding one written in Kotlin was a challenge, with most being written in Kotlin, with deprecated code.
This should be very useful to take inspiration from.
Coming back into the next semester, hopefully, the ball will get rolling again.
Weeks 7 - 10
We looked for similar projects around custom keyboards. As it turns out, the course despite having many lower-level courses didn't delve into keyboards. Rather there were lots of courses on handling user input within applications.
Our focus is to make a keyboard across applications, so these weren't as suitable.
The website is coming along nicely and having done a course in NextJS and firebase, it's beginning to get some of the key features built-in.
Still plenty of room to go - but progress is good.
Weeks 3 - 6
We continued working through the Android Kotlin course, and the start of the website was created. There was a focus on developing our understanding before we approached the keyboard itself.
We hope by having a good level of knowledge, we won't have as many bugs later, overall saving time.
At this stage, it was also decided to use TailwindCSS for the styling of the website, and firebase as a back end.
Week 2
We discussed the potential frameworks we could use for the website - we talked through the advantages and disadvantages of Vue, Angluar, and React.
Initially, we thought about using Vue but it was later decided that react combined with NextJS, enabling SSR, SSG and ISG would be a better contender.
We also found courses for android that we can use to help get the foundations of Kotlin down since not many of us have coded in it before.
Week 1
Team X15 founded!
We discussed various ideas of what the project could involve. Some we had were:
- A game involving singing competitions - in a similar style to rap battles.
- A simple browser built upon chromium.
- An online chess game.
- A social media-style site to help people interact in lockdown.
- A mathematical keyboard, with an accompanying website ← chosen
We felt that many of these projects were good in parts, with the potential for creativity. However, believed that while interesting, the browser may be too aspirational.
We feel there is a real need for a mathematical keyboard, having done maths over the years, we all agreed that it was tedious and often painful to share maths solutions with others - this feels like a realistic, and useful solution we can create.
The mathematical keyboard enables us to use languages commonly seen on the web - e.g. Javascript and likely a framework, alongside those commonly seen on phones - notably Java and more recently Kotlin.
Furthermore, in creating a keyboard, we will likely have to access some low-level android features, which should be interesting, yet challenging to approach.
Finally, this project leaves plenty of scope for enhancements. If we are to finish early we could add additional languages, additional symbols, or even calculation predictions - i.e. it would display the answer to the equation currently typed.