## Inspiration

My team mate was complaining about how she lost all of her work after forgetting to save on the bus. Thinking about this, we thought it would be a great tool to have reminders on things we needed built into our desktop to run at any time any place (without WiFi too). From this, we also remembered how much we both worked on computers everyday for our academic studies and decided to create one great solution to help us, thus came into existence our final idea to build a reminder system for break times for people who work.

## What it does

Our project is a unique reminder system for those who work. We present our users with options for choosing the kind of alert that the user will get and options to set a time interval. We have two main features where the user can either be alerted with a default text notification, or can begin their break with a random video from Youtube that automatically launches. We wanted the user to experience a new way of learning to balance life and work, and promote healthier working habits for each individual.

## How we built it

Our team consists of two people, each of whom have different skill sets. We worked to create an aesthetically pleasing interface married with a straightforward, functional implementation.
For the design, we worked to create a clean and minimal layout that promoted a sense of playfulness while maintaining maturity. The colour palette leans towards a dark but powerfully accented theme, suiting a broad range of audiences in personality and age.
For the software, we chose to code in C# using the Windows Forms library, since it allows for graphical user interfaces and we could develop with these tools quickly. The program switches between two modes while running: it uses a gui when getting the setting and alerting the user, and then acts as a system tray program while the timers are waiting.

## Challenges we ran into

Major challenges we had were mostly around the limitations of Windows forms. The library does not support nice looking image scaling, so we ended up exporting our graphics many times in order to get them to look and act perfectly within the window. We also found that Windows forms does not have very good support for system tray icons, so we spent most of you debugging time getting that to work well.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of how our different abilities were able to work together well. The work was essentially devided between design and implementation, and we were pleasantly surprise to see it come together nicely.

## What we learned

For the designer member of the team, the new things were using Visual Studio, image technologies, Git and Github, and working in a new social environment consisting of programmers rather than designers.
For the programmer of the team, new things were using C#, the Windows Forms library, graphics programming and making a program based on another persons design.

## What's next for AWe BREAK

We may take this project further by making it for more platforms. We can see it being convenient as a web-app or browser extension, or as a mobile app. We would also add more kinds of alert notifications, as a larger variety could give further incentive for people to reliably take breaks.
## Inspiration

As students and workers are using their laptops and phones for school and works, it is easy to be on our screens all day. To help increase mindfulness of how much time we may spend on our electronics and help users gain their autonomy over how they choose to use the web and time, we created Mindful. Mindful is an app that provides users with regularly-set, friendly reminders to take a break and include a recommended activity to do instead. Through our app Mindful, we hope to empower people use their screen time to do the things they love, and bring joy and some light-hearted humor in these unexpected times.

## What it does

Our application gives personalized notifications to remind users to take a break. Users can subscribe to receive a range of notifications such as a basic break time reminder, food recipes, workouts, places to explore, civic engagement actions, and even humorous dad jokes! NOTE: Must enable notifications for our app to work. Notifications are currently set to pop up every 20 seconds for testing purposes; however, we would realistically set the time to every 30 to 60 minutes.

## How we built it

We used an IDE called Repl.it to implement the function of the app & used Figma to create a mockup of our application.

## Challenges we ran into

We do not know how to make notifications at first, but we try to learn it from scratch.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are relatively inexperienced hackathon participants, and we are very happy that we were able to build a functional, minimum viable product in a short amount of time. Additionally, we are excited that we were able to work on a project that users would be able to regularly use and benefit from.

## What we learned

As a team, we all had areas in both front-end and back-end development where we were unsure of how to implement certain ideas. Despite this, we communicated and tried our best to help each other in our areas of weakness, and in the end, all of our team was able to learn new concepts of programming and contribute significantly to the project. One of our members was also able to learn front-end web development for the first time! Additionally, none of us had ever built a notification system before, and we are very happy that we figured it out. :)

## What's next for Mindful

First, we hope to deliver smarter notifications through Mindful, such as customizing recommendations to deliver based on user's schedules (meal times, workout times, class/work hours, etc.) and their screen-time usage on user-specified apps. As an example, Mindful would be able to track time spend on Facebook and deliver smart notifications for taking breaks based on the user's preferences. We also hope to make use of Google's databases to populate our data for recommended activities. In addition, we hope to make the Explore Board more socially-interactive for users by allowing them to see other's recommendations, share recommendations, and receive likes/upvotes on their recommendations. Lastly, we would love to implement the user submission feature so they can add their favorite fun ideas to our database as well!
## Inspiration

I've always been fascinated by the complexities of UX design, and this project was an opportunity to explore an interesting mode of interaction. I drew inspiration from the futuristic UIs that movies have to offer, such as Minority Report's gesture-based OS or Iron Man's heads-up display, Jarvis.

## What it does

Each window in your desktop is rendered on a separate piece of paper, creating a tangible version of your everyday computer. It is fully featured desktop, with specific shortcuts for window management.

## How I built it

The hardware is combination of a projector and a webcam. The camera tracks the position of the sheets of paper, on which the projector renders the corresponding window. An OpenCV backend does the heavy lifting, calculating the appropriate translation and warping to apply.

## Challenges I ran into

The projector was initially difficulty to setup, since it has a fairly long focusing distance. Also, the engine that tracks the pieces of paper was incredibly unreliable under certain lighting conditions, which made it difficult to calibrate the device.

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm glad to have been able to produce a functional product, that could possibly be developed into a commercial one. Furthermore, I believe I've managed to put an innovative spin to one of the oldest concepts in the history of computers: the desktop.

## What I learned

I learned lots about computer vision, and especially on how to do on-the-fly image manipulation.