Eat@Brown

Inspiration

As freshmen at Brown we found ourselves unsure how to navigate Brown's dining options. While information is available on a website in a 2000's table-like fashion, it's hard to get to and not mobile friendly at all.

With the launch of the new Brown API, we decided this would be a perfect time to create an all-inclusive Ratty and VDub app to allow students to easily check menu options on their phone. We often find ourselves thinking "is there any carrot cake at the VDub?" and "not pot roast jardiniere again!" only after we get to the dining hall. Now we can think that before we go in.

What it does

With tabs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which automatically go to the next meal based on time of day, and further controls to pick between Ratty and VDub, students can easily see all available dining options at the main dining halls.

How we built it

XCode and Swift

Challenges we ran into

XCode and Swift

What we learned

XCode and Swift

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Successful netcode to connect to the Brown API - harder than you would think
• Making the UI work with selections for VDub/Ratty, Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner, and navigation through days
• Simple design that stays out of the way so students can worry about the food, not the app (with some fun iOS specific details like a custom launchscreen)

What's next for Eat@Brown

• Facebook scraping and image recognition for Andrews Commons - a work in progress by Dan and Josh, to allow our favorite eatery to show up in the app
• Notifications for when your favorite foods are available, so you can never miss carrot cake or vegan rice pilaf ever again
• Food ratings, allowing students to rate reoccuring menu items, so they know to never, never get Polynesian Chicken Wings again.
• Food database with tracking for nutritional info and images of food, making the app more beautiful and more useful
• Force Touch because Joe has an iPhone 6S and thinks that's cool

Built With

• brown-api
• ios
• iphone-sdk
• swift
• xcode