Inspiration
It was midnight in SLO and we were only about halfway to Fremont. We just stopped by to have some bbq sandwiches when it dawns on us: we need to pee. The question was where? Everywhere we looked, there were closed stores and corner food joints with nowhere to go. Miserably, we searched for the nearest Denny's, but no luck. Then we tried McDonald's--it was rather far. We ended up going to Taco Bell. Once we were back in the car and ready to go, we thought about how inconvenient it was to even find bathrooms so late at night. Admittedly, we were set on calling the app "ShittySpots", be we decided "Number 2" was the best name. After all, it's such a problem nowadays that (if done right) this app can in fact be the number 2 app. We decided it was worth a shot and went for it.
How it works
It's basically a GoogleMaps-based app where there are points located around your location, found via GPS. Each point surrounding you is color-coded, and there's a button to show the legend. The points fall under one of seven categories: fast food, restaurants, supermarkets, hotels, schools/parks, and miscellaneous. There are buttons to add your own points and rate the current place you are selecting (which is still all under development). At the moment, the points are merely 17 points we search and manually added to a .txt file and parsed line-by-line, but we plan on using a sql-based database in the future, hosted on some server.
Challenges I ran into
We did not know how to even set up the temporarily free Linode server, and we couldn't figure out how to access the database via Java's sql library and a MySQL connector library we found online. Everything we did was our first time doing it (we've never worked with Android or SQL or PHP or the like before). We also had trouble uploading our files to GitHub, which was something we did not expect.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Learning how to develop for Android in such a short amount of time and getting as far as we are on the app.
What I learned
How little sleep Calvin can function on (only 5 minutes of sleep), how to dev in Android, how to set up a server on Linode, what pizza shops are still open at 3 am.
What's next for Number2
Crowd-sourcing, setting up the database, ratings, comments, etc. Basically what GoogleMaps and Yelp are but for toilets.
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