Around Me!!!

Inspiration

Whenever my team-mates and I visited a new place, searching for a hangout spot or a restaurant became a task. The around me feature provided by Google used to come handy at such times. Since it was our first time at a Hackathon, we went ahead and implemented the same feature provided in our own way.

What it does

You just have to open the homepage and based on whether you are hungry or bored, Around Me!!! will suggest you 20 eateries or attractions closest to you. Moreover, you can read its review on TripAdvisor before deciding.

How we built it

We used the Google maps javascript api's and TripAdvisor's geo-location api to determine the user's location and then search for places around him/her. We used javascript, html, and css along with jquery, ajax, and json.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we had a big time working with the api's since it was our first time. We also spent considerable amount of time on working with json because the json data was not available in the format that we needed. Once, we found a solution to it, we rushed through the rest of the development phase.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to determine, user's exact co-ordinates with just a click of the button and accordingly retrieve places around him/her. This feature which we had always been using in Google, we were able to implement it ourselves.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about working with API's along with javascript and json. We did not have much experience working on web technologies prior to working on this project, but by the time we reached the final phase, we believe we learnt a lot about api's and web technologies. This will act as motivation for us to try and develop more projects under this domain. Finally, we learnt that team effort is equally important along with the skillsets because as a team we were able to achieve a lot in a very short span of time. We look forward to attend more hackathons and stay in the learning flux.

What's next for Around Me!!!

In its current phase, Around Me!!! is just a webpage service but we plan to develop a mobile app which will be more portable and convenient to use for mobile devices.