Ongeowun Steven

Welcome to Zuri App

Photo by sutirta budiman on Unsplash

Welcome to Zuri App

ongeowun steven's photo
ongeowun steven
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3 min read

Table of contents

Problem.

We often spend a lot of time on our smartphones and the apps we use on a daily, Taking a lot of our time and we become addicted to these apps. Our productivity and human experience are brought to just interactions within apps taking away the human touch. According to google analytics and Business of apps, Social media platforms have been topping the list for the most used and downloaded apps in the last two years. Tiktok topping the chart for the most downloaded apps for the past two years in a row. followed by Facebook-owned apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself, Let's look at the numbers.

  • Tiktok 656 million downloads.
  • Instagram 545 million downloads.
  • Facebook 416 million downloads.
  • Whatsapp 395 million downloads. In China, WeChat has 1005 million downloads. What does that mean for our productivity and our interactions as human beings? More addictiveness and relying on the apps means less productive time.

Solution

What if we could freeze our apps for some time to allow us to be productive and have our human touch without losing our data in those apps. I created the Zuri app to enable us to freeze our apps for a period of time and then unfreeze it. This is an African-themed app with African designs from the login page to the landing page of the App, I used African Ankara fabrics for the design.

prints.png

Putting the idea into codes/Perspective.

I used the following tech to be able to come up with this;

  • AJAX JavaScript
  • PHP
  • MySQL(Apache)
  • Linode

For the backend of the app and used;

  • HTML
  • PHP
  • CSS

for the front end.

I used PHP and MySQL for the login system, the database is stored in a MySQL server in the local system and then transferred to the Linode server afterward for deploying, purely PHP for the logout and signup system. The Javascript(AJAX) code is used to upload the app and use the extension .apk(a challenge for the Apple apps) to ensure only apps can be selected to be frozen. For the uploading and downloading buttons, I used HTML tags for it, and they made it easy to connect the JavaScript since they are buttons. The upload() and download() HTML tags are the ones I used since they are straightforward.

<input class="uploadfile" onclick="uploadFile()" type="file" name="uploadfile">
<input class="downloadfile" onclick="downloadFile()" type="file" name="downloadfile">

Once the app is selected or picked by JavaScript, I link my PHP file within the Javascript codes, The PHP code is used to give a directory and where the app will be saved once it is picked up, The PHP directs the app where it will be stored/frozen, at the same time giving the user info of what's happening in the backend using echo"";

<?php
/* Get the name of the uploaded file */
$filename = $_FILES['file']['name'];

/* Choose where to save the uploaded file */
$location = "Zuriload/".$filename;

/* Save the uploaded file to the local filesystem */
if ( move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], $location) ) { 
  echo 'App freezed'; 
} else { 
  echo 'Failed to freeze app'; 
}

?>

Deploying on Linode

I created a server for myself and got my personal IP address which is different from my PC IP address I changed the domain to my Zuri website/App.

Resources

My private GitHub account github.com/Ongeowun/Zuri.app

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