Inspiration
We looked at common struggles of young college students: having to spend university meal plans on a fixed schedule, and often having to get rid of perfectly edible food. Not to mention the other side, being hungry and having no food! Every college student loves free food, so we sought to bring students and food together in a convenient location aware application.
What it does
Meal Share allows you or others to give away or look for free food on a college campus. By displaying posts for food within 1 mile of the user, Meal Share helps people spend their campus meal plans, or get rid of food without having to waste it by throwing it away.
How I built it
We built Meal Share simultaneously for both iOS and Android using Xcode for Mac OS X and Android Studio for Windows in combination with Parse server (web based)
Challenges I ran into
We got off to a very rocky start with Meal Share. Initially we were a team of four who were going to make an iOS app, but early on, two teammates left, and one of us found themselves without the proper hardware/software combination for iOS development, so we changed our course and built an app for both Android and iOS at the same time with no prior experience.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Honestly, we're proud that we were able to write an app for two platforms in one weekend without any prior experience with either.
What I learned
Claire: "I learned about optionals in Swift and how to handle them safely and elegantly" Rob: "I learned a lot about the software development process in a rapid development setting. From planning to execution, making decisions on which features were and were not viable given our timeframe, the kind of experience only a hackathon or similar enviornment can bring to the table.
What's next for Meal Share
While we might be able to consider Meal Share feature complete for the purposes of PennApps, we certainly plan on carrying through with development, refining our designs, adding more features and publishing to the respective platform application repos.
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