Inspiration
Coming to UF it was difficult to meet people and get invited to events and so to make meeting new people a little bit easier, we wanted to make a platform in which students can freely meet and hang out with new people.
What it does
We created a cross-platform mobile application for students on UF campus to meet new people and participate in different events. Using our platform any student can register for an account and then they will be provided with an interactive GoogleMaps screen on which they can see all the markers for events that are currently available. With these markers, they can tap on them to get the event’s information (description and amount of people attending) and choose to RSVP for the event. Alternatively, the user can put the app in “Create” mode and by simply tapping anywhere on the Google Map, the user will be prompted with an event form to schedule their own event at the tapped point on UF campus.
How we built it
We used Flutter as our mobile development framework so that the app can be freely available to both android and iOS users. For the interactive map on the home screen, we elected to use the Google Maps package for flutter. This package made it easy for us to provide a view of UF campus and allow the user to interact with custom-made event markers from other users. Google Maps is one of the many Google Cloud services offered by Google. For the database, we elected to use Google Firebase. Google Cloud Firebase provides an easy to use database service for mobile applications. This service made it very easy to store geolocation data and the other event meta data that we needed to run our app.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was implementing the Google Maps API. None of us have ever worked with it before and there was a lot of problem solving that we had to do to be able to read stored location data from Firebase and load it onto the GoogleMaps screen. Another issue that really stumped us was creating popup windows for when the user clicked on a map event marker. After hard work, however, we pulled through and figured it out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we were able to get all these different Google services (Flutter, Firebase, Maps) working together to create a finished product. We genuinely thought it was really cool how we were able to point on Google Maps where we want to create a new event and then have it appear for other users.
What we learned
We learned how to implement Google Maps API inside of a Flutter application and how to read geolocation data from Firebase to display onto a Google Maps screen. More importantly however, we learned how to work on a project as a team and collaborate to complete a project collectively.
What's next for Gator MeetUp
In the future we would like to add more sophisticated features that we were unable to do because of the time constraint. For one, we would like a tags system that would allow users to add different tags to their events such as “sports”, “clubbing”, “party” so that users who are interested in looking for an event can sort through the ones that they would be most interesting in participating in. We would also like to add a profile picture feature so that users can upload pictures of themselves and possibly a messaging feature so that people can chat with each other prior to an event.
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