Meals 4 Us

Inspiration

For this project I was inspired by my own struggles to find time to eat lunch or dinner with my friends while on campus. I would always try to share my weekly schedules with friends but as new club meetings came up and on-campus events, it became harder to to find time that overlapped with one another's schedules. Along with my experience on campus, I was also inspired by VALUENEX's workshops that reminded me of the importance of participating in social eating and how much happiness (oxytocin) it can truly bring to us. That's when I thought of Meals 4 Us.

What it does

Meals 4 Us is an IOS application that shares calendar schedules between your close circle of friends or family and makes it easy to find times to meet for a meal together. Users can customize their food preferences and favorite spots to eat at to help when choosing spots to buy from. Users can also choose recipes from a range of recipes that are related to their food preferences or anything they are craving. There is also messaging system that allows users to contact each other through the app and share how much time they have to eat, what they are craving, and live calendar updates that you can directly see your friends general availability if shared. Our app also has option to write busy over events as to not share exact plans. Notifications are also in place to notify you when a friend is suddenly available or set to be available.

How we built it

We built our wireframe through Figma and are making the app using swift on Xcode.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to find ways to include the VALUENEX Radar directly into our project but found difficulties when trying to upload different datasets so we decided to use it to support our ideation process for the application. Originally we tried to use the retools beta mobile app platform but found it a bit more difficult to use especially as it was in it's beta stage so then we moves to swift. Finding the correct platform in the end was a bigger challenge than we though. We are fairly new to writing IOS apps so our biggest challenge was trying and continuing to learn how to use swift to implement this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of our small but significant advances into learning how to code in swift and seeing our results in real time with our Iphone simulator. I had previously had challenged trying to learn how to use the VALUENEX Radar, but in the end was successfully able to analyze a research paper about the functions of social eating. We are also extremely proud of accomplishing a very solid wireframe in Figma as it was our first attempt at doing so and it is very close to our vision.

What we learned

We learned that making an IOS application is not easy and definitely needs more time than we had available to us to create a much more advanced product.