Calendar Compare

Inspiration

I’m sure we all know the pain of trying to meet up with friends or trying to organize anything in general, and just never being able to find the time to do it.  No matter what you do, it seems like everyone is busy, and by the time you actually find a day that works, it’s taken way longer than it needs to, and that’s putting it lightly.  But everyone has a simple google calendar they use, so what if we just imported that google calendar, compared that to the google calendar’s of all of their friends, and then find a time that everyone can meet up together?

That’s how we came up with Calendar Compare, a website that does exactly that, with a google sign in twist!

What it does

Calendar Compare prompts a user to sign in with Google, and then immediately imports the user’s current calendars.  After that, calendars are compared with other users to see when everyone is free!

How we built it

The backbone of Calendar Compare is the OAuth, which allows a user to sign in to their google account and extract the items on their Google Calendar.  We used a Flask Boilerplate HTML baseplate to form the basis of our website, and the entire project with Python.

Challenges we ran into

Burnout.  Pure burnout.

We didn’t prioritize time for anything fun initially.  It was work, work, work…and then we hit a wall.  All of us were feeling homesick, we were all tired, and we lacked a lot of motivation.  We realized that our idea had a bit of a high scope and seemed to be out of reach for us in a hackathon.  Only when we made the decision to focus on having fun did the project get back into high gear, and we started to really enjoy ourselves in the process!

Accomplishments we’re proud of

We were all very proud of the Google third party sign in.  Configuring the Google API and making sure the rest of the group had access to the right tools was VERY fun to do!  We’ve always wanted to see how technology like that works, and we were very engaged in actually getting to do it!  We were also very proud of Patrick’s comparison function, as it proved to be the heart of our program backend~

What we learned

Being in a hackathon isn’t about winning: it’s about having fun and coming up with unique ideas.  Unlike some of the other hackathons we’ve been in, at HawkHacks, we picked an idea that we thought had high potential, and while we all liked that idea, we started to burn out very quickly, and even started feeling homesick due to being away from home on the long weekend, even if this hackathon was happening in our own region.  We realized that maybe web development really isn’t for us, and we should go back to a hardware hack - which tends to be our strong suit - for our next hackathon.  Once we made a mentality switch to enjoying ourselves, our experience greatly improved, and we started to really enjoy ourselves!

Integration with Adobe Plugins

While we chose to make Calendar Compare as a web application, it has infinitely high potential as an Adobe Plugin.  Calendar Compare is vital to help with productivity, as it can easily show when all team members working on a project using any applications in adobe’s suite are available for meetings and collaborations.  For example, If Calendar Compare was being used alongside Adobe Premiere, users would easily be able to import their Google Calendar to find times to collaborate on various projects and complete various video reviews.  While this can be done in its current webpage state, an Adobe Plugin, which is a strong next step for Taikai.

Our Perfect Domain

Calendar.compare!  Sadly we couldn’t actually claim it due to pricing despite the promo code, but that would have been the go-to domain we would have used!

What’s next

There’s so many ways our idea can be expanded upon!  This includes…

• Using a database

• Creating and joining groups, as well as adding members to groups.

• Hosting it on a domain and a cloud server, or on a dedicated server in one of our houses

All in all, this was an eye opening experience of us!  It taught us the importance of picking an idea we are truly passionate about, and saving some time for fun in these long events!  We were very proud of being able to our experience at HawkHacks 2024 from turmoil to success, and still have a really cool project to show for it!

And with what we’ve made today, there’s a bright future ahead when it comes to picking schedules.  By creating a website that’s easy to use, accessible, and simple, Calendar Compare is perfect for picking a time to host all of your favourite events!

Team Devpost Accounts:

Adam: https://devpost.com/sullynumber9
Gavin: https://devpost.com/gavintranquilino
Patrick: https://devpost.com/patrickayman1