ND Dining Android App
In my last semester at Notre Dame, I took a class where we worked on mobile applications (iPhone and Android, specifically). My team decided to make an app that interfaced with the Notre Dame Food Services website to get all the menu and nutritional information for all the dining halls and eateries on campus. I worked on the Android version and it was a great learning experience.
We included three major tabs: discussion, menu, and more (where other includes search and other features like build-a-meal and a map). The main page can be seen below:
If you click through, you’ll get to a list of all the food and you can see the nutritional information about all the food:
And finally, you can search for any sort of food on the fly using several tags (healthy, vegan, etc.):
In the “more” tab, you can also view a map showing your current location and the location of all the eateries on campus. We thought this may be useful to visitors coming to campus who happen to find our app.
Also in the “more” tab is a build-a-meal feature that allows the user to specify a day, place, and calorie or fat maximums and a “meal” is built for them. This was very rudimentary (one result was completely drinks and condiments!), but the data we started with was rudimentary and it would have taken more time than we had to tag that data to create more robust meals.
The discussion page allows users to comment on specific foods as well as make general comments. We implemented a basic username functionality to keep users accountable for what they posted.
That is the gist of our ND Dining App. It was a lot of fun to make and a really great learning experience for me. I hope to continue developing apps in my free time going forward.
