eat drink see

Project 'Eat, Drink, See'

Finalist

Inspiration

It's difficult to be a tourist - you have to plan your itinerary long in advance and research where you have to go for each place. If you have little time, or can only walk a certain distance away from where you want to go, you want to know where to go quickly and usefully, tailoring your plan to your interests and your time to see the area. This would provide a quick, simple, useful way to collate what is nearby and decide what to see and where to go without the hassle of looking up individual places and trying to keep track of how far things are from your location. This would open up even smaller parts of the city to everyone, spending less time planning and more time doing. This would provide a better tourist experience in a city like Edinburgh, being so full of culture and amenities.

What it does

The user will select simple categories, whether they want to eat, drink, or see something. The app will then look at your current location within their set distance, providing an aesthetically pleasing list of cards with quick information about each location. The user can then select their favourite and it will be swiftly integrated into their itinerary. This process will continue to fill out their itinerary out, quickly creating a plan for their day. Once they press they are satisfied, a map is displayed with the various locations, and using the Google Maps API a route is drawn between them. This can then travel this route from their location as they please.

What we learned

Two of us learnt how to use Angular and Ionic for the first time, which was very tricky considering a lack of front-end experience in this area. These are skills that will come in very useful in the future, and we were able to interact our functionality with the layout. This was our first time using the Google Maps API. We managed to understand how several different parts of the functionality work, and integrate them successfully into web tools for a mobile app.

How we built it

We split the tasks, with 2 of us primarily focusing on integrating the Google Maps API and the relevant functionality in the appropriate way, with the 2 with more front-end experience providing the layouts and functionality of the various screens.

We used JavaScript for the Google Maps API, and TypeScript, Angular and Ionic for the front-end.

Challenges

Integrating some of the functionality of the Google Maps API was much harder than expected. Tracking and the displaying the users’ location is an example of this – easy in theory, but integrating it with Angular was much harder in practice. This was a common theme, as Angular using TypeScript occasionally meant more complex integration of the JavaScript Google Maps API.

The API would occasionally return the wrong data as well, which made testing the program problematic. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for this, and differed depending on the machine the app was being run on.

Our Team: George Tarleton, Euan Macqueen, Oliver Ursell, Mehdi Naderi Varandi