Oxford Mindmap: mobile app for sharing mental health experiences

We are excited to announce the release of the latest mobile app developed by Dreaming Spires:

Oxford Mindmap - Tell us your story!

From today, it's available on all major mobile app stores.

Created in partnership with the Oxford Ideas Festival, Oxford Mindmap is designed to give a new perspective on the city of Oxford. Through the app, users can explore Oxford, its locations and its buildings, as they relate to personal stories of mental health submitted anonymously by its users.

Users can explore an interactive map of the city scattered with map markers, one for each story. The stories are unlockable only when the user is physically within range, encouraging exploration of the city in a new way. Since each story has a unique connection with its location, users can experience first-hand the sights and atmosphere in the mind of each author.

Once unlocked, stories are viewable at any time from the Unlocked Stories tab. To recapture the feeling of the location, an appropriate banner image is displayed alongside it.

Since the stories pertain in particular to mental health, it's appropriate that users should be aware up-front of stories that broach difficult topics. Therefore, each story can be tagged with trigger warnings. Through the settings menu, users can specify whether there are particular tags which they'd rather not be exposed to. Such stories are subsequently hidden from view.

Users can also submit their own anonymous stories through an embedded form. The stories are staged for review, and can then be uploaded for viewing in the app in real time through an admin console on the server.

We encourage you to check out Oxford Mindmap if you're ever in Oxford, and want to explore the city in the footsteps of other people who came before. In particular, if you're interested in submitting a story of your own, we encourage you to fill in the form. Your story will be reviewed, and might even be chosen for inclusion!

The tech specs

We love open source software, so you can find the source code for the project here!

In the back end, a cloud server has been deployed using Dreaming Spires hosting which exposes an API to get the story data. The story data itself is backed up regularly to insure against data loss. Stories can be added to and removed from the database, and edited with a finer granularity, using the easy-to-use admin panel.

The app itself is built with Expo, and regularly polls the server to check for story updates, completing the over-the-air update system. To preserve user privacy, all processing related to the user location, such as the locking and unlocking of stories, is done client-side.

Interested in mobile development?

Whatever your project requirements, front or back end, we're sure to be able to find the right software solution to suit your needs. So go on, simply register your project with us to get started!