Airline Friend

People who have little to no experience in navigating airports need a seamless and stress-free transition to getting around this issue.

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Inspiration

As the world becomes every more connected as technology advances, the need to go to airports has skyrocketed. The urban population has continued to rise and air travel is projected to double in the next 20 years. While this increase continues to grow, not everyone can travel every year. Some have never even been on a plane at all. That is where my app, Airline Friend comes is. With its user-friendly UI and multitool capabilities, new or long-returning air travelers will be well-equipped to navigate the world's airports and be prepared for their flights.

What it does

Airline Friend offers three main utilities: a general reminders list where the user can store and listen to whatever reminder they need to be aware of as they traverse the airport, an airport/airplane tips and checklist to ensure they don't get lost or off-track, and three soothing music tracks that they can listen to on repeat in case of flight anxiety.

How I built it

The UI and main technical elements were written in Swift using Xcode. I also used CocoaPods to implement Microsoft's Azure Cognitive Service(text to speech) which is present in the view where the user stores their reminders(clicking the "i" button). I also stored those reminders using archiving in the Documents directory on the iPhone. This means that even when the user closes the app, the reminders list is still saved as all that data is stored as key-value pairs through archiving.

Challenges I ran into

At first, I had a hard time getting my scroll view to scroll properly where the tips/checklist is. The buttons would just stay in one place even though I knew the view extended past the screen. I was able to overcome this eventually by tinkering with constraints/Auto Layout to get the buttons to be attached to a scrolling view. Another problem I encountered was how to go about implement the Azure framework. I had never worked with CocoaPods or external frameworks before and this was very new to me. After much research, I was able to pull it off and come out with an implementation of text to speech I liked. Lastly, towards the end I had problems saving my program to GitHub. This is because the main Azure framework Unix executable was over 200mb and GitHub had a limit of accepting files of up to 100mb. I thought this wasn't too much of a problem and chose to exclude that file from my GitHub submission in order to upload the rest of the files.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is my first college hackathon and I feel that I have done very well. I didn't even know what to expect coming into here. After all the hacking, I feel I'm proud of the program I was able to create. I taught myself so much and was able to implement what I learned. I pushed through problems I couldn't solve in the past like getting a scroll view to work properly. Overall, I feel I am proud of being able to push through this TAMUHack and teach myself so much.

What I learned

I learned how to install frameworks with CocoaPods and how to use Microsoft's Azure Cognitive Service to implement text to speech in iOS apps. I also learned how to better use scroll views.

What's next for Airline Friend

Compatibility with more than just a couple of devices, possible inclusion of landscape mode, and fixed GitHub.

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