Inspiration
When we researched the many issues that college students tend to face, a few notable ones popped up. One in particular constantly popped up, and our older brother in college said he also has a similar problem. That issue is diet. Whether it be that college students don't have the tools to create recipes, recipes they find are too hard, or they just don't know how to use an ingredient in their pantry, diet is a huge problem for many college students. We wanted to create an app that could help those students who were struggling to have or think of a satisfying and creative meal using the ingredients they already have.
What it does
Simpli Grub is an app that will give you a list of various recipes based on an ingredient that you want to use. For example, if you want to use eggs, type in eggs to get a list of recipes that use eggs! We understand that college students don't necessarily have the tools or money to recreate intricate dishes, so we made sure all recipes contained in the app used minimal ingredients and only needed a microwave to prepare.
How we built it
We built the app using XCode and the programming language Swift.
Challenges we ran into
Due to the fact that we had minimal time and couldn't attach a Google Search, the number of recipes we could include in the app was minimal. Another challenge we faced was when we were trying to get data to be passed through view controllers. Despite this being our third time using xcode and swift, we still had a difficult time figuring out how to pass a string through one view controller to another.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment we are proud of was being able to incorporate some of our knowledge from school into our project. We recently learned of the Map data structure in a Computer Science class I was taking. We used the Swift analog to Maps - Dictionaries - to model the ingredients in each of the recipes.
What we learned
One thing we learned was how to create custom table view cells in UITableView. We wanted to have pictures for each of the dishes in the list. Though we struggled at first, we played around with it and figured in out. Another thing we learned was how to transfer the user to a search engine link. Though we had to find some help from this video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxFi4rO11uk) to get the syntax, we modified it a bit to fit our needs of having the picture be the button to the link.
What's next for Simpli Grub
We understand that all people (including college students) have specific dietary restrictions. We would like to add a feature that allows users to specify their dietary restrictions to influence the types of foods that would pop up from the user's search.
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