Text Booker

Kanye West once said, "We need to lower the prices of textbooks", and that's exactly what we've set out to do.

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1. Inspiration

We feel robbed on two fronts: when we buy our textbooks from bookstores and when we sell them back. Of course we can buy used textbooks online, but classes have already started and shipping is going to take two weeks. So do we sacrifice our wallets or do we sacrifice our grades? Hopefully, we don't have to compromise either.

2. What It Does

Text Booker allows students at colleges and universities to connect and sell their textbooks without a middle-man, empowering students to determine the price with the convenience of getting their books locally, plus they're organic.

3. How We Built It

We began by brainstorming on paper the various screens that would follow each other. Then, we determined the aesthetics: color scheme, format, congruency, etc. From there, we decided to focus on our strengths, two of us worked on the design aspect within Photoshop (whilst learning the basics of swift), while the other focused on the coding aspect.

4. Challenges We Ran Into

Several. From the utility standpoint, we had issues with making this app dissimilar from craigslist since we didn't want to incorporate direct payment. Additionally, in order for this app to be a successful across all universities, there would need to be a large number of users. From a technical standpoint, there were issues regarding the slide out menu, the incorporation of a CSV file, and the fact that only one Apple computer was available to code.

5. Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

The launch menu is on fleek (in our humble opinion). Additionally, Jesse was amazing at incorporating all of our ideas into the app, especially the sliding menu.

6. What We Learned

With two coding beginners, we learned a lot regarding the basics of app development, especially concerning the format and dictation. We also learned how incredible GitHub is and how powerful it is as a resource.

7. What's Next For Text Booker

We're all about making learning as accessible as possible. So perhaps a supplement to this app would be a note sharing app which would allow students to create collective notes (much like using a Google Docs) for a specific course during a specific semester with the availability to view notes from previous semesters.

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