I am a student in the beautiful city of Berlin! While we had an almost tropical summer this year, on any given day, I had two major goals. First, chill by the river during the day. Second, enjoy the nightlife of Berlin.
While the scorching sun didn’t let me do the former most days, I have my pockets to blame for not letting me do the latter. My friends and I even tried to make a list of awesome but cheaper pubs that we could hop to. Who were we kidding? Berlin is huge and has countless pubs and bars. We were never going to finish that list.
The nerd in me had an idea! Why not make an app which will navigate me through a pocket-friendly pub crawl from wherever I am. It was also empowering to be able to solve every day “problems” with a little bit of coding. I had to figure out a few things though, such as: What does the app actually do? On what device will I be using it? Which APIs do I need. Let's try and answer these questions.
First, the app should be able to locate me on a map, search for pubs around me and navigate me through them. I also have an Android based phone (I wouldn't be searching for cheap pubs if I could afford an iPhone). So, I chose the android platform and made sure I had the Android studio set up. Finally, the key points from my ideation were map, location, search and navigate. After going through the documentation, I realized that the APIs I will be needing are:
Interactive Maps : To render a map with features suitable for walking around.
Positioning : To locate myself on the map.
Places : To search for pubs and get their names, location and other details.
Routing : To navigate me through selected points of interest.