TaskMonster

Inspiration

TaskMonster was born out of a passion for productivity, an affinity for video games, and a desire to build something meaningful and fun at Mhacks16.

What it does

TaskMonster is a productivity app that gamifies your todo-list. Tasks become monsters, habits become buffs, and in-game rewards motivate you to pursue your goals.

How we built it

TaskMonster was created at MHacks16 by Brandon, Chris, Evan, and Raghav over the course of 24 hours. Brainstorming, debugging, designing, takeout, redbull, and lots of VSCode Live Share - these were just a few of the magic ingredients in TaskMonster. What started on a whiteboard in the Duderstat basement became just over 1300 lines of code and the beginning of a passion.

Challenges we ran into

We realized quite quickly that we had no clue how to design a user interface. As we struggled through the nuances of Dart and Flutter, Chris emerged as 'The Michael Jordan of Flutter' and we went from zero to something. We kept improving until we had a UI to be proud of. In order for TaskMonster to be the app we wanted it to be, it needed to interface between devices, across time, and and across locations. Cloud data storage was the obvious option, but the learning curve was steep and it was eventually pushed to be a stretch feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Three things stand out - first and foremost, the user interface. We went from absolutely bare-bones to features that surpassed our expectations, and that's something to be proud of. The interoperability of the various systems involved is also something we're quite proud of. This was undoubtedly one of the largest projects any of us had delved in to, and managing workflows between 4 people learning something totally new was both challenging and rewarding. Finally - the fact that the entire application (as of now) is in flutter/dart. This was a bit of a stretch for some of us (it's not quite as rigorous as c++) but looking back, the unity is remarkable. We are incredibly proud of what we did over the last 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned flutter. From scratch. enough to build an applciation. We also learned that large products can be inspiring, difficult, and fun. Passionate design decisions, stretch features, and stylistic choices brought TaskMonster to life and gave everyone a sense of ownership. We learned that hackathons are an excellent way to make friends and plan to regroup again sometime.

What's next for TaskMonster

We plan to convert TaskMonster into a fully functional application. Although MHacks provided the initial burst to overcome the friction of creating something from scratch, it wasn't enough time to fully explore and develop all the features we saw potential in. Future updates might include: