Inspiration
As a resident of downtown Austin, coordinating daily walks with a large number of friends can be difficult when schedules are constantly changing and life gets too busy to constantly message your friends about their availability to walk in our car-free backyard that makes up mostly the Ann and Roy Butler trail system where around 20,000 people live walking distance of this 11-mile looped trail that is ever expanding.
What it does
TrailMates is meant to bring nearby communities of your friends together and help you connect with them in a shared continuous outdoor third space. It is similar to Find My Friends but specifically for coordinating meetups on the trail. Your friends are notified of when you are walking on the trail and they are shown your location but only when you are using the trail system (unless you use the Do Not Disturb feature). This helps assuage fears that everyone on social media might have your location for privacy purposes. This iOS app is intended to be the missing link where friends in your community go from just transient acquaintances to deep friendships all facilitated by walking and talking.
How I built it
This was my first iOS project, at first built with react-native but later switched to pure Swift to promote a more seamless integration of AR features into the app.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I personally designed the front-end and art used on the home screen.
What I learned
I learned a lot about Swift and Xcode
What's next for Trailmates
The pilot program begins later this year!
