Carpool Ride Share
By Jared Weinstein
Demo Video:
Summary:
Student Ride Share is an app that allows users to set destinations that they want to travel to and to get picked up by other users who are driving to a nearby destination. As a driver, you will only find other people that are on the way to pick up as you travel to your destination.
API's Used:
Google Maps:
Required for users to place geofences on the map as a destination marker, and to see other user's markers
FireBase:
Allows users to log in, in order to save data across devices as well as see other users that aren't attached to the device
Gives each user a separate id that helps distinguish them from one another
Weekly Updates:
Week 0 (November 6 - 12):
Brainstormed ideas for what to make the app about
Created a slideshow presentation to propose the idea in class
Week 1 (November 13 - 19):
Started researching how to use the Firebase API and what the best practices were for structuring data
Registered a Google Maps API key
Started working on getting Google Maps working, as well as getting the geofencing to work
Week 2 (November 20 - 26):
Finished setting up the Google Maps API
Played around with drawing lines between two points, and how to add a third point linked with a user click
Researched how to find the distance between a line segment and a point, and implemented it with the latitude and longitude data that Google Maps uses
Week 3 (November 27 - December 3):
Spent a lot of time trying to sync data between users in real-time using the FireBase Realtime Database event listeners
Restructed how the data was organized between users to allow for an easier time processing linked user data
Week 4 (December 4 - 10):
Added UI elements to accompany the user experience and make it more streamlined
Fixed some bugs with syncing issues between the database and the users
Determined which features to cut down on to get a minimum viable product working before the showcase