LitRide

The ride that always benefits!

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Inspiration

It was always our dream to integrate 'access economy' within a taxi sharing application. When we came from India, each one of us felt how expensive the United States was in comparison to India in terms of going out for a movie or any entertainment; This idea was the inspiration behind creating an application that could make the whole experience of going out for a movie or an event cheaper for the end user!

What it does

This application provides the user with a free ride to the event they go to if and only if LitRide has partnered with the respective event. The web-generated ticket will contain a barcode, which when scanned by the LitRide Driver will make the ride free of cost for the passenger.

How I built it

Since this is an Android Application, we primarily used Android Studio with JavaScript. Our front-end designer, Tushar Jain, designed every detail using Photoshop. To enable Google Sign-In, we used the Google API. The Firebase was used to store user logins. Additionally, we used Google Maps for real-time location services. Again, we achieved that using the open-source Google Maps API. The Lyft API was used to generate real-time drivers around the LitRide users.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into quite a few challenges on our journey to creating the application we dreamt of. The Google Sign-In took us a long time to figure out. For once, we thought we should skip it and go ahead with basic sign-in, but we did not give up on that. Using Animations was challenging but a lot of fun for us. Using the Google Maps API effectively was time-consuming. Dealing with geo-special queries to generate real-time coordinates of the Lyft Drivers was another difficult step to implement, Connecting it to the events database to create free rides was a challenge we highly enjoyed countering!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating a fully functional demo application of an online taxi aggregator was a hectic and daunting task. Combining the different aspects of the application with the ideas in our mind was a wonderful experience, it required a high level of expertise in the subject matter and a sense of aesthetic to make it look and feel good. We are proud of executing the plan we had in mind and creating an application with a business model whose end goal is to benefit the end user.

What I learned

Learned to integrate google maps into the application. Dealing with real-time Database in order to synchronize the application between the user and the driver. Learn geo-special queries and how to generate real-time coordinates of moving items. Integrating different APIs together for them to work without error and in cohesion. Dealing with the camera for it to function as a barcode reader.

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