Nixr: Technical Report

Abstract

In today society a vast majority of people are attaining qualifications in the beauty industry. However there are a limited number of jobs available in salons and beauty bars. This trend sees many professionals creating their own business start up’s, either working from home or doing group callouts. This has become a huge trend on social media as newly graduates or unemployed professionals don’t charge half as much as a salon or beauty bar. As a result of this there is a large demand for these professionals in regular and last minute/emergency bookings. Facebook is a great way to advertise and showcase your work in this industry. Although it isn’t practical or sufficient when it comes to scheduling appointments, contacting a professional or simply just seen who is available around your location to accept you’re booking. By the end of 2016 there will be 4.7 billion mobile users and yet there are currently no apps on the market to manage all of these issues in one place. Currently social media, web sites, salons and word of mouth are currently the only way you can arrange an appointment for one of these professions. For my final year project I have developed a program that I have called “Nixer” which will allow both professionals and customers to access services in a quick and effective. Nixer allows users to open the app and instantly see the available professionals within their location, request an immediate or future booking. I designed my application using Android Xml files to create the UI layout, and Java as my programming language. Nixer uses an SQL database hosted online to store and retrieves any user data, this is used to retrieve all information provided by users. My application connects to the database using PHP scripts to define the methods for retrieving data. I started of testing my application using androids emulator but as I progressed certain features became a task in itself to run on the emulator, I then switched to a physical device