The Tripping Millennial

The Tripping Millennial is an application and companion Website designed with the younger traveler in mind. The app includes points of interest that should be appealing to the targeted demographic.

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Inspiration

The inspiration was developed after reading an article on the popularity of certain widely-unknown locations in San Antonio that have been used repeatedly by Instagram users and many of the hashtags associated with these locations have gone viral locally. Since San Antonio prides itself on being a tourist friendly destination. Having an app that could easily depict these locations for everyone not only Instagram users would allow visitors to have that much better experience in not only our great city, but also cities and towns across the country.

What it does

The companion Website is currently a portal to the links to both the iOS and Android apps in their respective stores. The mobile applications have selections that include:

  • Top Instagram photo taking locations
  • Organic / Farm to Table Restaurants
  • Craft Beers
  • Top songs via iHeart radio or radio stations
  • Unique shopping experiences / souvenirs
  • Cultural sites
  • Where the locals go

How we built it

The Website was built using Bootstrap 4 and video.js. The Android app was built with a grid view that displays photos or logos associated with each category search. Each search is accomplished using an API request to a service that returns the requested information. The Instagram portion is searched by scraping public Instagram posts as Facebook has also discontinued the Instagram API.

Challenges we ran into

Although we were able to write out the Android app in pseudo-code, we were unable to complete the API requests due to lack of knowledge. We also were semi-successful in scraping Instagram information, but we were unable to keep a consistent return from the query as well as having difficulty getting the up-to-date browser plugins to accomplish the task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

is that the four of our original team walked into the Hackathon yesterday morning, with no experience and never having met each other. We had a nursing student, mechanical engineer, and two computer science underclassmen. It was a challenge to start out, but once we were able to utilize everyone's skills to their maximum potential, we were able to get a lot accomplished.

What we learned

We learned a lot about API integration. Unfortunately, not quite enough. We also took advantage of all of the workshops by the sponsors as well as the cockroach.db localhost presentation. All in all, it was a great learning experience for all of us.

What's next for The Tripping Millennial

Completion of the Android app and the building out of its iOS sister. Much like Twitter, once the service is mature enough, we will start to build out the Website. We will continue to interface with our users and our potential user pool to keep improving on the look and feel of the interfaces, but also the content. Once the basic apps are complete, we will add onto them, particularly to enable our users to leave comments for us as well as start to decide if the service should be built out as a full social media platform. A nice add-on would be the ability of users to interface with the application by voice utilizing Siri, Alexa, or Assistant.

https://youtu.be/aNOgybfntRE

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