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What our product looks like ;)
Inspiration
We found inspiration for eHop as we noticed how much fast-food constantly surrounds us in our lives, especially when we're attempting to better ourselves through healthier eating habits or diets.
What it Does
eHop was built to act as a sort of reminder system for its users, steering them towards more healthy dining options as they try to pursue healthier eating habits. With the help of Geolocator and Yelp's APIs, eHop fetches a list of restaurants that are near the user, but only the ones that are healthy.
How we built it
eHop's major features are built upon on Yelp, Twilio, and Geolocator's APIs, with the majority of its code being written in Python. We created the list of restaurants to avoid relative to the users location through the utilization of Yelp and Geolocator's APIs. We used Twilio to manage the notifications being sent to the users phone as they were in the vicinity of those restaurants. We were able to use Heroku for website hosting, and fine-tune the aspects of our website through HTML-5 and CSS code. Using Flask as our main framework allowed us to utilize our Python code in our actual website.
Challenges we ran into
Our first problem was the platform we used: an iOS or Android app would have been ideal for our concept, but none of us had experience with app development. We opted for a web app instead, but we ran into more complications because of that. Our concept involved obtaining the user’s location in real time, but that proved difficult with a computer rather than a mobile device as the web page would have to remain open at all times for the user. We decided to hard-code the user’s coordinates in order to have a functional concept.
Accomplishments we're proud of
HackUCI was the first hackathon for three of our group members. Though it was very challenging, the seniority of our fourth member allowed us to learn at a faster rate and properly take part in the formal steps of development. Due to this, we were able to end up with a final project while simultaneously learning a lot about web development and front-end aspects of development. We were able to create a functional website with very little web-dev experience and are proud of our ability to work together considerably well under the given time limit.
What we learned
We learned that creating a web-app that utilized real-time location tracking over an actual app made in an IOS or Android development environment is much more difficult. We also learned how to integrate our Python code into our HTML/CSS through the use of Flask. Git version control also proved to be very important in our project, and our efficiency when working in a repository with multiple directories was something that we were able to gradually increase as we progressed.
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