Recap

Aesthetic

My friend, a large astronomy enthusiast, pointed out that many apps have an entirely red mode to block out blue light, as it distorts vision when its most critical to seeing stars in the night sky or through a telescope. So I designed the entire app in shades of black and gray, with the intention of supporting a red-scale version with a very plug-and-play approach. Gray-scale ensured the app wouldn’t look horrendous when I switched to red.

DB

This is my first project with a database. I opted to use sqlite and learn all about how it works. Though much of the commands are based on stack overflow threads, and my understanding is still lacking, I plan to further and devlop this skill as I work on storage for users and pictures. This is definently an important part of an app like this.

Glass layout

This doesn’t really deserve its own section, but I thought it was interesting.

The cleanest apps imo are ones that use the system colors and design. So react-native was an obvious choice. However, liquid glass is an experimental feature, and furthermore requires packaging and building the react-native in a way that makes it near impossible to hot-reload using expo-go. For this reason, I opted to make my own liquid glass elements, pulling in the native ui library to apply it to elements of my own.

Astronomy logic

This is the core portion of the app. The main idea of the app is to engage users, and provide a constant influx of ideas and targets to see. It is hard for some to constantly have to look up what would be fun to see, with their equipment and location, and current weather.

Our app solves this by crunching all the data for this and displaying it in an easy-to-read format. We first calculate the different weather and astrological conditions at the time for the user. This involves calculating a multitude of values, but it all collapses into a single equation: score: reasons.length === 0 ? 0.5 + quality / 2 : (quality / 2) * 0.5 where quality is based off headroom and moonroom, and the other weather conditions (pulled from a local weather api)