About 5 — YKH

UTSwap

An iOS mobile application engineered through Swift with the intention of buying and selling goods designated for UT Austin students specifically around campus area

Programming Academic Project

Overview

During our days as an undergraduate student, we’ve constantly had to move to a new place when a semester or school year is finished. Every time this move happens, we end up clearing a lot of unused things: textbooks, notebooks, electronics, accessories, or even small furnitures. As such, for this iOS programming project, we came up with idea of creating a mobile app platform specifically for students in our university, The University of Texas at Austin, to trade and swap goods.

As this project was a software engineering based academic project, the primary focus is on applying our skills in iOS programming, Swift language, and Firebase functionalities and being able to launch a practical mobile application based on it. This was my favorite team project throughout my university days, as I have had a lot of fun working together with Peggy and Jessica. Distribution of work in project isn’t separated that clearly as we help each other out throughout the project, and I very much appreciated the atmosphere we had when working together.

Role:

Team: Peggy (Han-Pei) Chiang, Yang-Kai Hsieh (Me), Jessica Trejo

Duration: 3.5 Months (Aug 2021 - Dec 2021)

Used Appliances: Swift, Firebase Authentication, Firebase Database, Firebase Storage, Adobe Illustrator

Personal Role: iOS software engineer (Focus on account authentication, profile picture and data storage, goods entry upload/liked products system, home page functionaries, account settings, and many more)

Source Code: https://github.com/racingandy1103/UTSwap

Planning

Before starting the implementation, we worked together draw the storyboard and workflow of the application, as well as the functions the app would have.

The aim is to create an application where users could create an account, login, upload their personal contact information and profile picture, be able to upload things they would like to sell, be able to manage a list of certain materials they may potentially buy, and many more. Users would be able to text with the sellers with a in-app texting system and be able to pinpoint the location for a meeting through a UT Austin campus in-app map.

Implementation

I had fun in working with firebase authentication and storage to develop a working account system that can save names, settings, contacts, passwords, and upload profile pictures, and other interesting functions like popover list of liked materials, core data to save settings after app closure, and much more Generally speaking, we all worked on most storyboards and screens, and distribution of work in project isn’t distinguished that clearly as we help each other out quite a lot throughout the project.

I have personally been using mainly iOS system based phones and tablets in daily life for over ten years, and it was fun coming up with ways we could utilize the functionalities with potentials of Xcode, Swift, Pods, Firebase, and concepts like Cora Data and Photo Library.

Examples of Product App Functions: