Exactum | Devpost

Inspiration

With schools turning virtual, we felt that we needed a better way to keep in touch with updates regarding assignments and posts, without constantly having to refresh Google Classroom. Enter Exactum.

What it does

Exactum is built on the premise of sending Window popups, when websites of YOUR choosing update. Can’t wait to listen to the latest release of your favourite podcast, but don’t want to keep refreshing forever? Exactum’s got you covered. Want to be notified when a stock you’ve been eyeing for a while changes price? Exactum’s got it in the bag. Can’t be bothered checking when your teacher or professor posts a new online assignment? Trivial for Exactum. These are just some of the countless uses that Exactum has to offer, and as we roll out more features, you’re sure to find more creative uses. So, give it a try! The skies the limit when you use Exactum.

How we built it

We prototyped it in Python with the tkinter and requests modules, and then built it as an executable with pyinstaller. We have plans to recode it as a Chrome extension.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was getting our application to be cross-platform friendly. Since our team used different browsers and operating systems, it was challenging to make our application function correctly on all of them. Another challenge we faced was near the start of the hackathon, where we struggled to create an idea that a) we enjoyed and thought was useful and b) not too niche and specific.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After hours of hard work, we are all proud to say that we created a product that we all enjoy and will use in our daily lives.

What's next for Exactum

As we were limited to a 36-hour competition, there is still a plethora of new features that we would like to roll out to improve Exactum. One of the ways we thought we could improve Exactum was to reimplement it as a Google Chrome Extension. This would make it easier-to-access for all users, as well as provide no need to download any of the running files. We also recognize that not everyone is a fan of the popup window design that we currently have, so we also hope to branch out to have email support in the future as well. Lastly, the final feature we hope to include in the future is a line-by-line difference of changes, similar to how GitHub does it. This would allow for a more comprehensive analysis of when a website is updated, and would overall provide a cleaner, smoother experience for our users.