Papyromancy: A way of divination through folding paper. Some say a true papyromancer can crumple up any piece of paper, unfold it, and predict the future from the creased lines reading the creased paper the way that a palm reader would read a person's palm. -Wikipedia
When it comes to currency exchange, sometimes it seems the exchange rates are as ambiguous as a fortune teller. The rates can be all over the board, and how do we know if we are getting a fair rate? We've created an app that will give you the current exchange rate when exchanging American dollars to another currency. We've also included a purchasing power parity that will give you a better idea of how far your dollar will go in those countries.
Once we decided to make this app we started writing pseudocode to map out our plan of action. Then we made a wireframe diagram to get an idea of how we wanted the app to present itself on a device. Because the world is going mobile we wanted it to be an app that was mobile first. We divided up tasks to start the project and got to work.
We wanted to divide up the tasks according to our coding strengths, but also wanted to get exposure in areas we need more practice. Within our group we put one who was stronger in an area with one who needed practice in that area and vice versa. Once we got the main framework we all worked together to get it functioning. It worked great to 'mob code' having everyone figuring out how to make it work and researching different ideas and topics. Our biggest challenge was merging errors in github. We made it work but didn't get it to work smoothly until closer to the end of the project.
We used 2 server side API's in our app. A currency converter API, and a purchasing power parity API. For the base framework and design of our app we used Materialize. To call the API's in our code we used Axios.
We plan to continue working on this project, and add currency exchange locations, directions, and ratings to each establishment using a map API. We will also add more currency and country options to convert from USD. We'll add the option to convert from other currencies other than USD. We hope to be able to provide data that will help the user find the most reputible currency exchange locations, so that they can have more cash for their trip. There are so many different rates that some of these currency exchange buisinesses will give. We are trying to eliminate the bad locations with help from reviews, and research on more relevant data.
