Carpool Ride Share

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