Northcfish is a mobile-first web app.
If you happen to walk or scuba dive somewhere on the coast of the North Sea, eg. at Aberdeen, Scotland or at Stavanger, Norway and find a strange looking fish, this app will help you identifying the name and other details of the animal. In four steps you will get to the common English and scientific name, the classification and a few additional information.
The browser based application is intended for fish-maniacs and amateur biologists and the concept was created by a fish-maniac, Samu Turi who happens to be my son. At the time of writing Samu is a full-time BSc student of the University of Aberdeen with Marine Biology and Aquaculture as his major. Samu put together the database that contains 222 species typical for the North Sea. Myself as a proud father was only a humble servant turning the concept into reality.
The UI of Northcfish was designed with a truly mobile-first approach assuming that the typical use case is 'on the field' or actually on the coast.
Start by specifying the size of the fish in front of you. The logic will take into account that you have found perhaps an undeveloped specimen.
Identify the shape.
Filter the search by colors.
The more colors you pick, the more chance you have.
The final step of the filtering flow is based on photos, the user has to select the best match.
Currently the datasheet provides mostly categorization only.
The filtering method is quite similar to the wizzard approach used in my earlier web app, the
Nutrients 4 Veggies. Also the underlying technology is almost the same: Python with Flask web framework and MySQL database though with a much smaller and simpler dataset. For sake of rapid development and easy hosting I decided to use Pythonanywhere so that I can reuse experince gained when developing my earlier web app. The simple UI is using the free responsive CSS of W3Schools.
We worked on this project during the first few months of 2022. Unfortunately the owner of the concept, ie. my son, decided against developing the app further because by the time we reached this stage of the development he realized the weaknesses of the design concept and lost interest in further work.
