EZ Meal planner

Inspiration

When brainstorming for sometime to build, I asked my parents what problems they had which could be solved with software. My dad said that as a family we struggled with planning meals for the week. That inspired me to create a program which helps people plan out their meals for the week.

What it does

This program has several functionalities including a one time meal generator, a generator that will plan out lunch and dinner and a generator that plans out your entire week of lunches and dinners.

How we built it

We programmed the application in Java, using the swing library for the user interface.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time using swing and building any form of UI in Java which made properly scaling things difficult and resulted in several frustrating hours trying to get it to look right. On the back end of things, we initially set out to use an API which would have allowed us to pull from a deep well of recipes. We were unable to figure out how to access it and decided to scrap the idea for a future idea. Additionally one of our team members left early and is also the owner of the github and I couldn't figure out how to rename it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we don't think it's the prettiest application but for our first time using swing and UI building in general, we feel it's pretty easy to understand and functions pretty well.

What we learned

We learned the difficulties of GUI building and how to use swing to create GUI's. We also learned the importance of user friendliness especially when building an application for general usage.

What's next for EZ Meal planner

Better looking, more consistent, stylized UI. Breakfast meal suggestions. More in-depth recipe features. Saving/exporting meals and schedules. Recipe API support. Clean up the code (A lot unnecessary stuff, uncommented, poor naming conventions etc)

Built With

• java