IDC Eats

Inspiration

The inspiration for this app was to initially eliminate the long wait times at restaurants and allowing the consumer to see multiple options when going out to eat. The second phase of the program was created in order to help restaurants cut down on food waste and be able to have a higher table turnover rate at their establishments and make the app financially profitable.

What it does

The app uses a google api to first display restaurants with names on a map. Then each restaurant has a page linked to it when the pin was clicked, which displayed the live wait times, peak hours, and the menu for the restaurant.

How I built it

The base of the program was built on the google maps api. After It was implemented, I chose 6 restaurants that had usually long wait times at peak times and used them as examples. I found the coordinates of the restaurants and placed a pin along with a name tag on the map. Then I added a listener to the main class that would tell which pin was clicked. From there i set up an integer value that would proceed into a conditional clause and would start a new activity (turn a new page) in the android app. This new page would show all the data for the restaurant selected.

Challenges I ran into

The first big hurdle for me to climb in creating this app was getting the google api to work and display a map. It was not until the very end of the android workshop that I was able to get passed a "hello world" screen. From there it wasn't smooth sailing, but more of a night of trying everything that didn't work until it did. My last big hurdle was getting the information to show up in a readable way. Android studio has these weird constraint rules for displaying text that made every word get pushed up to the top. That alone caused such pain form 3 to 7 am. In the big picture sort of challenges I was the only guy on my team who could code java, and it was a fun ride teaching Sam and Matthew how to do conditionals and classes while I myself forgot to put semicolons and spelling variables 1 letter off. However in no way did they make my experience any less enjoyable as they contributed greatly in the power point presentation, artwork, database setup, psuedocode and my overall motivation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very happy to have made my first android app and to have learned to use Android Studio. However I am even more grateful for the friends that I have made over my stay here.