Meal Maker

Inspiration

We've all experienced the struggle of not being able to decide what to eat. This app is designed to allow for easy decision making when it comes to meal time. If we can build a "dream" meal, this app will provide locations that live up to that dream.

What it does

The app starts by prompting the user to pick ingredients for a meal. The picking system is designed after app-based dating, where the user swipes left or right to "dislike" or "like" an ingredient. Every time the user swipes, the app learns more about what kind of food the user would like to eat. Upon finding a match, the app displays a map of the nearby area with the user's location as well as nearby restaurants that serve that food. The user can click on the different restaurants to see their name, address, average rating, and copy the address to get directions using their favorite mapping app.

How we built it

This is a cross-platform mobile app built using Flutter. We used a variety of technologies, mainly the Google Maps SDK and the Places API for the actual map and the nearby restaurants.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using Flutter and integrating it with other third-party SDKs. It was a rough start, but we eventually learned how to properly integrate a variety of different technologies within the app. The picking system was also a challenge, as we had to create a way for matching a list of ingredients to the right type of meal.

What's next for Meal Maker

Right now, there are only 6 possible meals that can be generated. A big improvement would be to add more meals and match them to more ingredient combinations. Flutter is designed for cross-platform use, so we hope to eventually build a desktop app and a web app from the same codebase. We also plan to integrate more parts of the Google Places API to display even more local restaurant information.

Built With

• dart
• flutter
• intellij-idea
• kotlin
• swift