Made my first iOS app on my own!

Hi friends!! I finished making my first iOS app all on my own today!!

I used XCode and Swift and a really handy tutorial by CodeWithChris.com. My app is the card game, War, which is a really simple card game. I used the arc4random_uniform function to get a random number from 0-12 and then called different cards from the array corresponding to those random numbers. Whichever player has the higher card would get a point and their total at the bottom of the screen would update. The hardest part of the making the game was probably figuring out all the autolayout stuff. It was really cool learning Swift though because the syntax is so different than other languages I know (no semicolons!???? or parentheses around if statement conditions??!!!). Here are some screenshots from when I first finished the game last night.

 Clicking the "DEAL" button deals two cards to each player randomly

One of my friends suggested adding a way to clear/end the game without having to restart the app. I did that this morning by adding a "clear" button that will reset the players' totals.

Teaching myself iOS development was a really fun experience so far and I'm excited to make more apps :D

iOS Development

Hi friends! Since HackMIT I've been extremely determined to go into CalHacks (October 9-11) knowing as much as possible. As a result, my friend and I are currently learning iOS development. We're using XCode 7 and Swift. I'm using the tutorial http://codewithchris.com/how-to-make-an-iphone-app/ and I'm currently learning to make the game War! More updates to come later :)

HackMIT: CelluScope

CelluScope: An app that has the potential to diagnose malaria, sickle cell disease, and more with extremely inexpensive equipment 

Last weekend I attended my first hackathon - HackMIT. I took a redeye flight from LAX to BOS and arrived at MIT very sleepy with only 2 hours of sleep and a small duffle bag.

During check-in and breakfast, I found three other people for my team - Poseidon, David, and ArisKnight. We decided to create an app that would utilize a small microscope that Poseidon brought with him. The microscope cost less than $50 and once attached to the iPhone camera, could magnify images up to 200x-300x. After researching what we could see at that scale, we decided to focus on red blood cells. One of the sponsors at the hackathon was Clarifai. They had just finished a new API and released it for the attendees of HackMIT. With their new API, you could now customize training for Clarifai. Now, we could feed any input to Clarifai and train it to recognize different things. We trained it using images from Google Images of malaria infected red blood cells, sickle cell anemia affected red blood cells, and healthy red blood cells. Soon enough, it was able to do so with surprising accuracy. Even though we were able to only train Clarifai with less than 20 images for each classification, it was still diagnosing test pictures accurately.

We created CelluScope. CelluScope was an iOS app built with Objective.C able to identify malaria infected red blood cells, sickle cell anemia, and healthy red blood cells. The idea is that you can use this app without being an expert on what you're taking pictures of. Although we chose to focus on blood cells, you could use this app to discover what microorganisms are lurking in your neighborhood pond. We think this app would be perfect for doctors working in the field, perhaps at a clinic. Not only do they not need to carry a bulky microscope, but they can identify samples on the spot, save the pictures, and have the app help them identify samples.

The greatest challenge in creating CelluScope was creating a workaround for the fact that Clarifai's new API had not been optimized for iOS. We did this using Parse and javascript.

Out of over 250+ teams and 1000 hackers, our app made it to Top 10 and as a result, we got to demo our app at the closing ceremony! :)

Our app being used with the attachable microscope

Here is a backlight, magnet and a slide with a plant stem sample. 

Here is what that plant stem cell looks like using our app and microscope.

We bled for this project. This is the blood of one of our teammates underneath the app's microscope.