Welcome to Sprintr!
Sprintr is Chrome browser extension and web app built by Tim Chew, Jeannie Yamakawa, and Robert Varela in the course of a week.
Our goal was to incentivize productivity through creating a Chrome browser extension and web application that allows users to create "Sprints," or competitions, that track friends' time spent on productive websites.
Technologies:
- Node.js
- Express
- AngularJS
- PostgreSQL
- Semantic-UI - to help with page styling
- Heroku - used for deployment
- Knex.js - used as SQL query builder
-
This was our very first application built in Angular, and we learned a lot about the digest cycle and rendering dynamically-updated views in the process, as our Chrome extension's time-tracking functionality is working in the background at all times.
-
We had lofty aspirations of connecting to players' PayPal accounts to be able to have a cash payout for winning. We applied with PayPal Developer to use its Payouts API twice, but were rejected both times on the basis our app being categorized as "online gaming." PayPal's dev support phone representatives described our business model as a "too risky a category" for PayPal to allow us use of the Payouts API. We then had to find an alternative to allow the transfer of money through our app, which we found and implemented successfully in Dwolla.
-
The Google Chrome extension development environment was entirely new for all three of us and took some getting used to.
-
To dynamically render leaderboard Sprint data with ChartJS, we used a 3rd-party Angular chart library.
-
We wanted to have the web portal automatically render a user's personalized dashboard when a user clicks "View Web Portal" button on the extension popup, but we discovered that the Chrome extension's local storage is a completely different local storage from the Chrome browser's local storage, thus creating a chasm in the saved data about who is logged in. This was the one challenge we were not able to solve in the week allotted for our project, although the user's data is both viewable and current when he/she logs into the web app. We also learned a lot about navigating Google's JavaScript APIs because of this challenge.
## 1. Create a Sprint
[![https://gyazo.com/e2f7039b7438447e147089f4ddb1e750](https://i.gyazo.com/e2f7039b7438447e147089f4ddb1e750.png)](https://gyazo.com/e2f7039b7438447e147089f4ddb1e750)
* Name your Sprint. * Pick a start and end date for your Sprint. * Designate the productive websites you would like to track during the course of your Sprint. * If you would like to up the stakes, designate your Sprint as a cash game. This will require all players to contribute to a cash pot (through Dwolla). The winner of the Sprint takes home the pot.
[![https://gyazo.com/86a0f43d50b78898099bdf34f8c04da1](https://i.gyazo.com/86a0f43d50b78898099bdf34f8c04da1.png)](https://gyazo.com/86a0f43d50b78898099bdf34f8c04da1)
* Players can join existing games as long as they have the unique game code that Sprintr generates for each Sprint. * If the Sprint is a cash game, players will be authenticated through Dwolla and their Dwolla account will be connected to the Sprint.
- Anyone who has downloaded the extension can log in right on the extension popup itself.
- Players can view Sprintr game stats directly from the extension for any competition they're a part of.
- Sprintr's web portal generates a more detailed view for all games a player is a part of.
- The player's dashboard page lists stats for all current games.
[![https://gyazo.com/0209b2a5918a5dfe3507c25594327bf8](https://i.gyazo.com/0209b2a5918a5dfe3507c25594327bf8.png)](https://gyazo.com/0209b2a5918a5dfe3507c25594327bf8)
* The game's leaderboard page shows individualized stats as a donut chart as well as a chart that displays players' game rankings and the countdown to the end of the game.
Thanks for Sprinting with us! Hard work pays off. Let's Sprint together.