Gate way

We are gate centric mobile service to improve traveler's post-security experience at the terminal. Provide walk time to get to your Gate. Provides you visibility of restaurants around your gate, with walk time between stores and your gate to help your time management.

Inspiration

I had a connection in IAH a couple of weeks ago and had about a 50minute layover, thats long enough to get some real food instead of just snacking in the United lounge so I went to go eat. I felt like eating asian food though, and unlike how I can normally yelp everything or google nearby, it was difficult even after I finally found a directory in person (and the mobile directory online was terrible to try navigate on my phone for some reason, let alone figure out what kind of food I was looking at by their names). Eventually I asked some airport employees who told me there were two, but the close one was not good and the other one was all the way in the one of the other terminals, and I wasn't sure if I had enough time left by that point for it to all work out. Tough decisions, something not even Yelp is bothering to focus on. Gate Way solves this problem.

How it works

Gate Way utilizes the beacon system deployed at SFO to tell you how far (walking time) you are from your gate, and also lists the dining options in the terminal, clearly marking what kind of food they are as well. You can easily work out how much of a detour its going to be and whether the walk is worth it. It also tells you how long before the doors close for your flight (not just when it boards), and attempts to use Sabre's seasonality API to guess if the airport might be busy.

Challenges I ran into

Even though both Amadaeus and Sabre are here, neither of their available APIs unfortunately provide flight status (I realised its all only cached data that they can perform nicely with- all the real-time APIs are locked away being only for paid clients that need approval). The indoo.rs SDK worked, but their documentation is awful (opposite problem of Sabre/Amadaeus). I managed to reverse-engineer some of what I needed from the indoo.rs sample though (in lieu of actual docs).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finally getting indoo.rs to work, and also the many hours I spent getting xcode running and my friend's spare iPhone jailbroken. This was actually my first ever iPhone app and I had never touched nor saw iPhone code until yesterday.

What I learned

How to make an iPhone app for the first time (ever!), how accurate/inaccurate and reliable/unreliable beacons can be, and how guarded flight status APIs apparently are (haha).

What's next for GateAway

Filters to actually filter by type of food, SFO T2 only has 12 restaurents so its not needed yet. Live flight status information (I just cached it there for now since I have no access to live data right now- flightstats is probably the soonest available one, but even that is 2 business days away; Seems like flight status information is a surprisingly protected piece of data haha). Try and use the sabre REST calls directly- right now it goes through a php bridge on my website.

Built With

• beacon
• indoo.rs
• objective-c
• rest
• xcode