Inspiration

The clients for the product we thought of developing for are people who are known for being an avid shopper of gifts like housing décor. But until recently, there was a problem; they were always complaining that they did not know what their friends and relatives wanted for holidays like their birthdays. This issue had two sides: (1) always asking what people want and (2) remembering what they say. I remembered myself being disappointed with the presents I received on my birthday, so I came up with the solution. I developed an online platform to create a network for sharing gift preferences. With this platform to share gift preferences, people will be able to know each other’s gift wishes without directly asking them. It prevents people from wasting their time choosing a gift that might be not liked by the receiver. What it does

It is a social network, where users can create their accounts and add their gift preferences for different holidays. It can be used as a plugin for already existing social media platforms. People can add friends, see each other's gift wishes, comment on them, edit their preferences, add new ones, put priority levels on the gifts. How we built it

We built our program using Dart language and Flutter, which is a UI software development kit created by Google. For the backend, we used MySQL, where we created databases with different tables and relational databases, where the users' information is stored.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, we are proud to say that we are all participating in hackathons for the first time ever. Thus, we had to face a lot of challenges: starting from transportation issues from another state to debugging all the errors. None of us have ever used Flutter before and we had to learn and code on our way, which was very hard. Then, we created a database system with all the logic for the users' data and the relationship between them in MySQL. However, we tried to connect the database in Flutter utilizing PHP, we run into an inability to connect to the database. Thus, we stuck on this error for the whole day not being able to manipulate the back-end in the cross-platform that we are all using for the first time. Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that despite the fact that we are all new developers and it is our first-ever hackathon, we were able to finish our product. We are also proud of our teamwork and how we were able to teach ourselves a completely new language in a such short period of time. What we learned

We learned how to use MySQL and we learned a completely new for us language Dart and FLutter environment. What's next for GiftBook

We highly believe that it is a very promising product that can be used as a ready-to-market sell plugin for other social media platforms. First, we need to incorporate a very feasible database which is going to be Firebase. Then, we are going to work on the front-end and back-end development, trying to incorporate more and more features.

Official Submission and Demonstrations on https://devpost.com/software/giftbook