Azul | Devpost

Inspiration

Normal travel apps might not be that fun. We have taken it a step further and turned the process of getting and receiving recommendations into something special.

What it does

If you are traveling to some place and you want to get some first hand recommendations about things to do, then Azul is the right app. Inspired by the 'Message in a Bottle' theme, we have a bottle full of stories just for you. Whenever anyone using the app update a message we store it along with the location information that users have shared. So when you are in the area, you get this list of really personal insights into things you could do.

How we built it

We built a mobile app using Objective C. We are hosting the database in Microsoft's Azure cloud hosting.

Challenges we ran into

At first we decided to host the database locally and use python with Flask for serving the Json. But after we went to the Microsoft's session on Azure, we decided to go with its amazing cloud hosting system. That meant we had to scrap whatever we had done till then on the database part. Also we only had one experienced Objective C developer. It was a first time developing mobile app for many of us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have the basic working product. We are very happy we figured out how to use the Azure hosting for our backend. We have great UI. We learn to work in a group. Our hard work.

What we learned

Building a fully functional app during a short period of time is challenging. Since for some of us it was our first time using Objective C, the hackathon was a great learning experience. Having people with varied background (design, coding etc) is very good for work division.