Our mobile app is intended to be a mood journal with a twist. - It is aimed at anyone looking to improve their mental health practises, with features included to particularly help those requiring support with this. - Along with the ability to record your mood and notes daily, you can: - use the app to meditate with it's built in timer and backing audio - read about any negative emotions you may be feeling with the mood bios - be inspired by the daily quote - or inspire others by uploading quotes that you like, using the text/optical character recognition feature - You can also: - save quotes, with the ability to view all saved quotes, and share them to other platforms - use the calendar to check previous journal entries.

We used: React Native, Expo, TypeScript, MongoDB, Node with express.js.

We chose React Native as we wanted to produce a mobile app that would work on both iOS and Android. Expo and Expo Go allowed us to get going and develop this more easily. They were also compatible with the Google Cloud Vision API which was the basis for our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature. We felt that TypeScript was a complementary choice, as there was plenty of documentation around it's use with the other technologies we had chosen. It was also a new language to us all, and so we felt getting to grips with it would contribute to our growth as developers. MongoDB was selected as the basis for our backend, as it was not felt that a relational database was required for our relatively simple data set.

Initially, one of the biggest issues was during the planning and spiking phase, when we realised that some of the more popular optical character recognition tech would not be compatible with what seemed to be the more obvious choices for the rest of our stack. This lead to a fair amount of difficulty and time spent spiking numerous combinations of front end frameworks and text recognition packages. Thankfully we eventually landed on our chosen combo of React Native, Expo (expo-image-picker) and utilising the Google Cloud Vision API. More generally, the speed at which we had to learn about, pick up and implement the numerous new technologies we had chosen, at times felt particularly challenging. Though we usually found that with enough time, we could work through these difficulties. Lastly, due to the nature of 2 of the groups' members being parents (and responsible for the school run), there was a fair amount of flexibility and organisation required in order to ensure that every team member was on the same page, as well as contributing effectively to the project.

As a team we are hugely proud of what we've managed to produce in the timeframe given. We think the topic of mental health is an important one, and hope that our app goes some way to demonstrating this. We'd also like to thank Northcoders for an incredible bootcamp experience, and a brilliant introduction into the world of tech!