X@Y

Take the crowd-sourced reporting ability of Waze and use it to report on local occurrences; you have X happening @ Y

Comment

Inspiration

Inspired by a night out at the bars that was ruined by the appearance of a police officer. Out unfortunate friend was charged with a Minor In Possession the day before his 21st birthday. We wanted a better way to know when police was coming into our vicinity

What it does

This app not only allows users to report on the appearance of police at the bars, but also on free food being offered around campus, local events happening such as a flash mob in Turlington or a great band playing around town.

How we built it

We built this project using Android Studio and the Google Maps API to locate a user's coordinates at the time of reporting.

Challenges we ran into

Interacting with the Google Maps API was a large hump to get over. The lifecycle of which events happen at specific times with Google Maps is very tricky and documentation on the matter is surprisingly lackluster. Thanks to StackOverflow, however, we were able to solve most of our problems

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting markers to appear on the map and the usage of the Singleton Design Pattern to maintain a persistent list of markers to show on the map.

What we learned

Android development is hard! We were not prepared to spend so much time reading up on reference guides and on StackOverflow. Once we got the hang of the Android app lifecycle we began implementing much faster but until that moment we were stuck with unhelpful guides by Google

What's next for X@Y

We will most likely keep working on the project sparingly because the idea is interesting and has the potential to be useful to us and many of our friends.

Share this project:

Updates