Project · Honors thesis
Interactive Idlewild
A mobile app that preserves the history of Idlewild, Michigan, a historic Black resort community.
- Mobile app
- Flutter
- Firebase
- Built solo
- Honors thesis
Thesis paper coming soon
- Role
- Sole designer and developer
- Timeline
- Oct 2024 – Dec 2026
- Context
- Honors thesis, WMU
- Status
- Demo-ready on Android
Overview
Idlewild's history was scattered across personal memories and disconnected sources. The app brings it together: visitors explore an illustrated town map, read history written by the community and find local events, while admins review everything before it goes public.
I designed, built and tested it on my own as my honors thesis. Feedback from students on a trip to Idlewild and from my thesis committee shaped the final app, from a new resources hub to image descriptions for screen readers.
Highlights
Illustrated town map
Zoomable map with pins that link to stories and events, and line up on every screen size.
Community stories
Contributors write articles with images, and readers search and filter by tag.
Writing tools
A rich text editor with drafts saved on the phone. When someone edits a published article, admins review it in a diff view that highlights what was added and removed.
Admin review
Every post, edit and event is reviewed first, and denials come with feedback.
Key challenges
Keeping roles secure Result: Security rules check the role on every read and write, and server functions refuse role changes from anyone but an admin.
Problem
My first plan stored each user's role on their own profile, which users are allowed to edit. Someone bypassing the app could have written directly to their profile and made themselves an admin.
What I did
Moved roles into Firebase Auth custom claims, which only server code can set, with role changes handled by server functions that check the caller.
Rebuilding with a real architecture Result: Every one of the app's 39 screens now follows the same structure, which made new features faster to add.
Problem
The first version mixed screen and logic code, and progress stalled.
What I did
Learned MVVM from developers in the WMU Developer Club, planned the app in Figma and rebuilt it from scratch with a layered structure.
How it's built
App
- Flutter
- Dart
- GoRouter
- get_it
- SQLite
Backend
- Firebase Auth
- Firestore
- Cloud Functions
- Node.js
- Storage
Testing
- Mocha
- Firebase Emulator
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