WhereToTour

An app that suggests destinations to visit.

Comment

Inspiration

Honestly, this idea just randomly came into my mind a few days before the event began. I'm sorry I don't have much more to write about :(

What it does

This is an app that helps you decide on a destination country to visit using various criteria, and providing any relevant details about them. Currently, it supports narrowing down the list of nations via region (Americas, EU, Asia, etc.) and population density (low, medium, high).

How I built it

I used Flutter as the framework for building this mobile app, in addition to the REST Countries and Google Maps APIs.

Challenges I ran into

  • Realizing that there's bound to be problems out of your control with a relatively new framework like Flutter that won't be fixed for a while (looking at you, SvgPicture: https://github.com/dnfield/flutter_svg/issues/103)
  • JSON parsing from the API with a minimal amount of help from the debugging console
  • Android emulator lag (explained in later section)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Not being stumped by any issue for too long: There were so many CS-related projects where I got stumped on a single issue holding the entire program hostage and didn't find a fix until I came in with a fresh mind a few days afterwards. That would be real trouble with a 24-hour time limit, so I'm glad I was able to avoid this. It helps that I'm already somewhat familiar with Flutter and its fallacies from earlier projects.
  • Actually integrating Google Maps into my project!

What I learned

  • Developing using the Android emulator
    • My new phone doesn't come with a cable that can plug into my PC, so I had to resort to developing purely on the Android emulator rather than my personal phone. It's harder in some ways (laggy and crashes often) but better in other ways (can do everything on one screen, don't need to worry about burn in on my phone's OLED screen, etc.)
  • Using the Google Maps API
    • It's really cool.

What's next for WhereToTour

A top priority will definitely be to add more criteria for the user to choose from. At the moment the only criteria available are region and population density. That might necessitate the use of more APIs, as the REST Countries API is very general and doesn't go too in depth for each country.

An overview of the app will be temporarily hosted on my personal site, along with a video demo: https://pollsmor.me

Share this project:

Updates