Reminder Rides

Inspiration

We've used Uber when we was in NYC. We were annoyed that we couldn't use Uber without the phone app right in front of us. Sometimes we only had a laptop or desktop in front of us. Additionally, we had events in the future that we had to plan out and painstakingly search up the address (AGAIN) for when using Uber.

What it does

Synchronizes iOS calendar events with our App and Uber. We take the location and time that they specify in their event and send them a reminder to book their uber on the day of their event. Users won't have to remember the exact address of their event if they plug it in early. (They can also select the ride they want and the estimated price ahead of time.) Users can also make new events in our app that they specifically want to reserve Ubers for in the future. We push those events to the calendar app.

How I built it

Used Swift to write events to the calendar and read them back for our own in-app event display and Uber requests. Monitored iPhone's native calendar in the background and sent push notifications so the user can request without going through all of the data entry.

Challenges I ran into

Webapp database that we were going to make broke halfway. SQL database username/password kept failing. Also putting the web app on EC2 was extremely difficult. Uber also required SSL for its api on web.

Hard to refresh our own events to synchronize with the calendar. Memory deallocation issues in iOS. Oauth 2.0 was difficult to figure out in the Uber api.