The ReplayFX App is the perfect companion for anyone attending the annual Replay Foundation Expo in Pittsburgh on July 27-30, 2017. The four-day conference will feature more than 750 arcade and pinball machines, over 2,000 retro console games, tabletop games, a showcase of new products by game developers, competitions offering over $110,000 in prize money, movies, seminars, magicians, live musicians, balloon artists, face-painters, and more.
With so many events and attractions, we thought it might be useful to provide an easily accessible app for viewing the entire four-day schedule. In addition to viewing the full schedule, users may also choose to view events by their type: games, competitions, movies, live music, and seminars. Users can add their favorite events from any of these views to a personal schedule, allowing them to prioritize concurrent events and design their optimal ReplayFX experience.
Upon opening the ReplayFX App, the default tab ("Experience") displays a full list of events. Using the scrollable tab bar at the top, users may opt to narrow down the schedule by their favorites ("My Schedule"), popular events ("Featured"), games ("Play"), tournaments ("Compete"), movies ("Watch"), music ("Listen"), or seminars ("Learn"). All events within each tab are conveniently ordered by date and time, with the time and location showing.
Clicking the circular icon to the bottom left of an event triggers a pop-up, which displays additional information, including a description of the selected event and corresponding image. Clicking on the gaming controller icon to the bottom right of each event adds or removes the event to the personal schedule. The gaming controller will turn from grey to purple when added, and back to grey when removed.
Note the smaller gaming controller icon to the right of the "My Schedule" tab. The number next to the icon represents how many events have been saved to the personal schedule. This number will change automatically as users add or remove events to their favorites. Since this app features local storage, users may view the full schedule and current favorite events without an internet connection.
Our team of six came together during the second session of Academy Pittsburgh, an intensive coding bootcamp. Using the full stack web development skills we attained over the course of twelve weeks, we created this app as a gift to the Replay Foundation, a nonprofit organization that orchestrates pinball competitions worldwide under the brand name PAPA.
Meet our team: :star: Kalene Csefalvay ⭐ Cindy Green ⭐ Sanjeev Padmanabhan ⭐ Caitlin Reed ⭐ Heather Schall-Lucas ⭐ Cray Thomas
We built the ReplayFX App over the last two weeks of our session at Academy Pittsburgh: the first week was spent scaffolding, developing, and testing functionality; the second week consisted of further testing, integrating, and optimizing the app before delivering the final product to the Replay Foundation.
Since our team was relatively new to React at the start of this project, we used the Pepperoni Starter Kit as the foundation for our app. Although we occasionally worked independently, we more often worked as a group so that our grasp on React improved through each stage of development.
Knowing that ReplayFX is a high-volume conference with over 10,000 participants, we anticipated potential issues with wifi lag. For this reason, we opted to store data locally, which allows users to access the full schedule of events, as well as their personal favorites. Even without a connection, they will have the information they need to show up at the correct location on time. Local storage also eliminated the need for a user login.
A special thanks to Josh Gretz for introducing us to React/Redux, and our deepest gratitude to John Lange, who instructed us at Academy Pittsburgh and served as our mentor throughout the building process.
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