Come Thru - Invite your family within seconds!

Inspiration

I have a relatively big family who frequently tries to organize family gatherings on weekends. Their usual strategy is to either drop the invitation in a text message on a group chat which gets talked over/ignored or does not reach everyone or to call each and every person and this is where the problem lies. The accumulated hours wasted on inviting my family could have been used for other, more valuable, ways. So, I decided to take on the challenge to build a platform where my family can easily create and send invitations. Although there are many other apps out there who take on a similar approach, they are not catered towards families and they seem a little complicated in the eyes of a lot of my non-tech savvy family members. I built my app around these two main issues and my family seems to enjoy it!

What it does

My app allows families to search and add other family members so that they can create and send event invitations to members of their families. The app is built so that anyone in a family, no matter how technically proficient they are, can easily make use of its main feature.

How I built it

I used Firebase to store all of the event details and usernames and cross referenced them inside Swift to properly make requests and populate the right cells. It also utilizes a variety of different cocoa pods to give it a more premium feel.

Challenges I ran into

Even though Firebase was a huge part of making my app, it was not my specialty. I had a very hard time getting the concepts down in the beginning, but through time and a lot of research... I was able to nail down most if not all of Firebase's functionality to use it to my advantage!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I was able to make the UI look clean. In the process of building the backend of my app, my only worry was not being able to finish on time and ending up with an unpolished app, but I was wrong. I had to put in a couple extra hours than expected, but because of this, I was able to polish my app, fulfilling my second goal of making it appeal to non-techsavy individuals!

What's next for Come Thru - Invite your family within seconds!

I want to make user profiles so that users can personalize to distinguish themselves as well as add profile pictures and also add push notifications to take it to the next level! Also, I want to add a functionality where users can comment on each event to send any last minute updates.

Built With

• firebase
• swift3
• xcode8