Please note: commit history was not retained when transferring this repository to protect api keys.
In the summer of 2013, a member of UT Student Government approached the Computer Science majors' Facebook group asking if anyone would be interested in helping them develop mobile apps for SUREwalk. SUREwalk is student-run, volunteer service where students can call at late hours of the night to have two volunteers come out and walk with them to wherever they need to go. SUREwalk wanted to improve their accessibility to students (before you just had to call them). We were more than happy to help with this cause.
Along with the Android side, other students also developed an iOS app and a website built with Rails, with all three platforms sharing a unified back end via Parse. If they opt to release that source code, we will post links here.
We wanted to share this for the benefit of anyone else interested in developing an app for this purpose, or just developing an app itself.
- There is a main Dashboard Fragment that we use for the home screen, and displayed with a Twitter fragment (at their request) under a ViewPager
- The meat of the app is in the Request Activity. This is where we handled a paged request flow (we considered using WizardPager, but opted to roll our own instead). The steps of the flow are as follow:
- Information: Name, EID, Phone, and E-Mail
- Location: This is their start location, found either with the GPS or by entering an address to Google's Geocoding API
- Destination: This is their destination, selected on a map displaying SUREwalk's boundaries
- Review: This is the last step, allowing them to review their information and add any comments before submission.
- Throughout the Request flow, a ParseObject that mirrors one set up in our Parse database is constructed and fleshed out. Upon submission, this object is then saved to the Parse database, which is then polled by the Rails server to check for new requests.
- After SUREwalk receives the request and assigns it, a push notification is sent back using Parse+GCM to alert the user than the volunteers are on their way.
If you want to build this on your own, you'll need to edit/create two files. One called private_strings.xml currently just holds dummy information, you'll need to populate it accordingly. The other is com_crashlytics_export_strings.xml, which is currently untracked (per Crashlytics' recommendations). This file is autogenerated if you set up crashlytics with your IDE. If you don't want to use it, simply comment out the Crashlytics startup code in the onCreate() method of MainActivity and build.gradle.
(All our private information is in an untracked private.md file)
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014 SUREwalk
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