PawCare App | Devpost

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Photoshop Prototype 1
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Inspiration

As current pet owners we understand the challenges faced by many when making traveling plans or dealing with daily commitments. Where do we leave our pets? Who else has a pet around me? Is there someone who could walk my pet at this exact time? This app is an effective solution since it will allow communities to allocate their time more efficiently, create job opportunities all while leaving pets in caring hands. We inspired ourselves from the existing Uber App, which allows people to find the nearest vehicle rider available. However, we want this app to additionally offer the ability to create and maintain long-lasting social networks within neighborhoods.

What it does

The app helps pet owners who need someone to take care of their pet find someone around their neighborhood who can do the job. The versatility of the app allows users to "petsit", "pet walk" or enjoy the service of having their pet being "petsitted" or "pet walked". Besides, users would need to create both user and pet profiles as a means to screen potential pet walkers and pet sitters to ensure the safety of pets at all time.

How I built it

We built PawCare App using Xcode and Swift. In addition, we incorporated MapKit in our project. We watched many video tutorials to aid in our understanding of these programs that we had never worked with in the past.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into many challenges during our project but this helped us learn a lot about the iOS app developing world. We had to learn how to use integrated development environments such as Xcode and Swift. In addition, we researched how to use MapKit in order to be able to incorporate a map in our app as it is a key component of the project. Furthermore, since we did not have the same versions of Xcode in our computers, we had trouble combining different parts of the project, especially the map. We consistently asked for guidance from our mentors and tried to debug to the best of our ability.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud of our work as it is our first time developing an app and working with Xcode, Swift and MapKit. We faced many challenges but did not give up and did our best to create a project that we plan on further developing after this hackathon.

What I learned

We learned a lot more about app development and specifically about Swift. We had worked with Java and Python before, which gave us a basic understanding of the code. Xcode, however, its an excellent platform that made our lives easier since we could visualize the app while in progress.

What's next for PawCare App

PawCare app is a starting point for a much broader self-sustained network. Adoption opportunities, collection of donations, establishing and maintaining social connections among pet owners and their pets, emergency contacts, shops and nearest pet spas available are some of the many features that PawCare App could provide to its users. Our personal connection to this project as well as great curiosity for the iOS development world, are some of the reasons why we will keep working on this project outside the limits of this hackathon competition.