iRoutePlanner

iRoutePlanner's start screen

Engineers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have to do a “Senior Design Project” where they collaborate with a group of people and professors in order to create a product that they believe consumers would utilize. Project leaders have to design a product, gather a team to implement the project idea, and then present their product to a group of professors. The product that our project leader decided on was an iPhone application that can take in the user’s starting location and then a list of locations that the user would like to visit. The application will then compute the shortest route the user can take in order to get to each location.

For this project, I was the lead Graphical User Interface (GUI) designer. My resposibility was to create a user interface that easily allowed the user to input their current location, and create a list of locations for the purpose stated above. The user is able to add and delete locations using this app, but there is no functionality to reorder to locations, since the order would be modified later once the application calculates the shortest path. Once the path is created, the user can look at the directions to each location on Google Maps. As you visit each location, you can remove them from the list, and the app will recalculate the shortest path the user should take based on the left over locations. This way, if the user decides to visit a location out of order, it will be taken into consideration (as well as other factors such as time of day and traffic).

This was the first time I had ever worked in a software engineering project that was outside of the normal course work, so I learned many basic skills during the project. Using Github to make it easier to collaborate with multiple people, learning a new language for a specific project, and meeting up with teammates and give progress reports are just some of the many new things I had to do during the project. This was a small project with a team of only 4 people, so this was still relatively easy for someone new to the computer science field, and allowed me to make mistakes without jeprodizing the entire project.

Github Repo