ICEE Locator provides users the ability to find the nearest location carrying ICEE's based on their current location. The app was built by Mark Caldropoli and Emily Lakic at BrickHack 3 and won the award for the Best Reverse Engineering App.
We built the ICEE Locator using the programming languages Swift, Python, and Ruby, and the software Xcode. We used the Google Places API to create a map displaying nearby locations of establishments carrying ICEE's.
Beginning our app development, using the limited resources of the Google Places API was the least of our problems. Integrating both Google Places API and Google Maps API to work simultaneously proved to be almost impossible after about 8 hours of coding. Attempting to obtain the current location of said user using the Google Maps API on Xcode outputted a return of 'nil' at every test run. Our second challenge was obtaining a post request using the software Postman from the ICEE Locator on the ICEE website, which output a 500 Internal Service Error unfixable on our part.
As our first time using Swift and creating an iOS App, we are both happy and completely surprised at the outcome of our app. While sharing our project with people at BrickHack, we were relieved to hear the positive responses and the numerous "I love ICEE's!", "I'd get it!" and even "I'd pay $5 dollars for that!".
Google is your best friend. Literally. Look everything and anything up; being able to find valuable information on code is a real skill in terms of computer science. We learned more about Swift and API's and how to overall use XCode as a coding platform.
We have emailed the ICEE company for help concerning their 500 Internal Service Error in an effort to improve both their website's locator as well as further our own iOS app. As a continuation for our app in the future, we will try to make it in another programming language, such as Javascript or Objective-C.