Argos was a 3-man team project for my mobile development class. It makes use of Vancouver’s bike rack and crime data set to help bicyclists make informed decisions about placement of their bicycles when unattended. Bike racks are visualized as markers on the map and bike thefts are shown on the map with a switch of the toggle.
In this project, my tasks on this project include design, api calls, and clusters. I got to design the front page of the app and turned my design into code. I also utilized the OpenWeather API to display the temperature. I took additional time to find weather icons that fit with the font and styling of the app instead of just using the icons given in the OpenWeather API. I wanted the user to make customization even if it was a small change so I created the background images and developed code for the user to change the background in the settings activity.
The biggest challenge with this app was working with data that wasn’t ready to use immediately, what I mean is the bike rack data set did not have X and Y coordinates. To resolve this problem, we estimated the X and Y coordinates by making reverse geocoding requests. We made the calls once and saved it to a firebase database. In the future, requests could be made every few months as the calls are timely and expensive.
Other challenges included the sheer amount of bike racks, it was way too much data to save onto a user’s phone and (prior to using clusters) the marks on map representing the bike racks was overwhelming. Our solutions were to use firebase and to use clusters. I implemented clusters to improve the visibility of the bike racks on the map for the users.
On a final note, our app won in our category against 13 other competitors. I had an awesome time building this app with my team mates and made some awesome git comments if I say so myself.
Here is a download link to the apk file: http://www.stellatrantech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/argos.apk