The screen in which the user can input their search criteria
One of the pictures in a "swype" which the user could choose or swipe past
The screen displaying the restaurant info after the user selected it
Another screen displaying a different restaurant option

SWYPE

Inspiration

At the start of this Hackathon, our team had no idea what to code. As such, we decided to think about a more pressing matter of what we wanted to eat that night. That's when we realized we had no clue. We pulled up UberEats and were overwhelmed with so many options and thought that it would be so much easier if we could look at them in smaller chunks and thus, Swype was born.

What it does

Swype is a mobile app in which the user can input different criteria such as their location, preferred price range, cuisine of choice, and be able to browse through curated set of restaurants in their area. These restaurants are present in a user-friendly format allowing them to "swype" through the options. Once they have chosen an option they are interested in, Swype provided them with information on the restaurant and allows them to order.

How we built it

The UI/UX was done with Figma. Swype was built using React Native v4.x and Expo. The APIs used were: Yelp Fusion, Google Distance Matrix, and Google Geolocation.

Challenges we ran into

By far the largest challenges we encountered stemmed from two main task: finding a swipe component which would work our app and getting the Yelp API to work. We ended up trying about 3/4 different Swipe components before we were finally able to settle on a Swipe component that wouldn't crash and would allow use to render what we wanted to. With using the Yelp API we struggled to get the call to the API to correctly return what we expected as the documentation was unclear.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of our execution of the app, despite the hardships and difficulties we faced. Additionally, we felt really accomplished having been able to complete a project of this scope within the amount of time that the hackathon spanned across.

What we learned

One of the largest learning curves for our group was working on the frontend of the project. All three of us are primarily more experience with backend development and as such working with Figma and the styling was a challenging piece of the app. As well, with a majority of our experience being in web design, it was really interesting to learn how different and challenging app development.

What's next for Swype

We originally decided on the restaurant application for Swype based on us not knowing what to eat, however, after thinking further, we believe that Swype has applications across a person's everyday decision making. We would like to be able to add the utility for our users to be able to choose from a wider variety of topics and as well have the option to input their own options/choices to aid a variety of decisions.