Weekly Update: Major Breakthroughs With Chats!

BREAKING NEWS

You heard it here first, friends! The Chinchilla Chat team has been working diligently and is finally ready to reveal the news: We have a working chat app!

Chinchilla Chat conversation between three parties: users helic0pter, v, and csc.

Okay so before we get too excited, it's still missing some important functionality, and we need to make sure our code is robust and will withstand the pressures of use in the wild. But in a controlled environment, we were able to accomplish functional chatting. Users' messages are stored and can be retrieved from Firebase (the server side of this operation). Users can even create group chats involving several parties, as demonstrated in the screenshot above. While we had hoped to have this functionality by the end of our first sprint, it turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated; however, we have finally accomplished it, and we are pleased to now share this breakthrough.

The end of the term (and thus our directed work on this project) is coming quickly, and we will not have very much time to implement additional features, but we do have plans for updates we consider necessary, including:

• Fixing the timestamps to allow for 12-hour time
• Standardizing username formats
• Allowing users to search for friends effectively (Currently chats can only be started by entering known usernames, which defeats the purpose of a platform intended for meeting people.)
• Allowing users to block each other
• Adding push notifications so users know if they receive a message without having to routinely check all of their chats
• Some back-end changes to make the app more robust and usable

We would also like to add additional settings and customization features, as time permits. We hope that over the next week we can make great strides to provide the LGBTQ+ student community with a great app!