Explore R'Side

Here in the city of Riverside, we tend to catch people ask the question of what can we do in this far-from-OC city. Though at first glance there may not be much, we have some hidden gems to offer.

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Inspiration

Our mobile app, Explore R'side, was inspired by our underclassmen and our own experiences in Riverside. After attending University of California, Riverside for a couple years, we noticed that our underclassmen would always talk about not knowing enough about the area, wanting to enjoy delicious foods, and do fun activities. We wanted to create an app that showcased what Riverside truly had to offer and be able to share our experiences and recommendations.

What it does

Explore R'side currently displays different locations divided by categories: food, drinks, places of interest, and recreational places. You are able to look at the name of the location and read a brief description about its specialties, recommendations, and personal favorites from the area.

How we built it

We used the framework provided by Flutter to develop widgets that would create the structure of the app. Essentially, the app is a collection of pages that you can navigate through back and forth. The majority of the code is written in Dart.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was the development phase. We spent a good portion debating back and forth between ideas and the app's potential effectiveness and uniqueness. Another challenge we had was learning the tools needed to develop the app. While we were familiar with object-oriented languages such as C++, we were completely new to frontend languages. We researched languages that would be efficient, while being easy to learn within the time constraint, and ultimately, the team decided to use Figma and Flutter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that we were able to make a visual product. We are new to frontend development so it was a challenge to learn flutter and figma and apply it to an application with no prior knowledge. It was rewarding to see an app that we thought of, come into realization.

What we learned

We learned how development works for mobile apps and how to manage our time for development for our next project.

What's next for Explore R'Side

Our team believes we can expand on the app even more. We really want to implement a search engine using Google API, so that users will be able to look up for more locations. That way, there would be more ease of access within the app, instead of having to use multiple apps. We also want to implement an input feature where Riverside locals can upload and share more popular locations to explore.

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