Food Search

Hungry but can't decide what to eat? Let us decide.

This app will help you decide what you should eat by recommending restaurants to you based on 3 given criteria. Location. Cuisine. And price.

Download now on TestFlight!

Motivation

My friends and I always seem find ourselves wondering what to eat, so I set out to create an app that could decide that for us. I know there is Yelp which is great for searching for food if you already kinda know what you want, but I couldn't find anything on the AppStore like the old UrbanSpoon app that would recommend a restaurant to you based on 3 criteria. Location, cuisine, and price.

Screenshots

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes

This project was created using Xcode 10 and Swift 5

Prerequisites

In order to compile this project you must have Xcode and CocoaPods installed on your Mac

• Xcode can be installed here
• Here is a StackOverflow post on how to install CocoaPods

You will also need a Yelp account to access the Yelp Fusion API.

After creating a Yelp account navigate here and create an app and name it whatever you want. All you need is the API Key after it's created.

Installing

Once you have completed the prerequisites, clone the project repo and navigate to the project directory using your terminal.

cd path/to/project

After navigating to the project you will need to create a file to hold your API Key.

First, navigate to Food Search and create a folder called Secret Then, inside of that folder, create a file named Secrets.swift Finally, inside of Secrets.swift, create a public constant named yApiKey and set it equal to a string containing your Yelp Fusion API Key

Now, install the pods for your project by navigating back to the root project folder in your terminal and running

pod install

Make sure to open Food Search.xcworkspace.

You should now be able to run the project.

To Do

Here is a link to the Trello board.

Built With

• Yelp Fusion API - API used to retrieve all restaurant data
• SDWebImage - Library to handle downloading and caching images in iOS

What I learned

I learned how to use the profiler to find memory leaks while debugging an application. I had to deal with a retain cycle that was caused by a strong reference to a delegate which wasn't being released when a restaurant view controller was being popped from the navigation controller

I never used User Defaults to store data before because in other projects I needed to store objects and large amounts of data and I simply didn't know how to use it. It turns out using defaults is very easy and since I didn't need to store tons of stuff, it's pretty efficient too. I implemented this using a static class.

For my networking layer, I took a protocol oriented approach so that way I could have as much flexibility as possible when creating requests. I based my approach on this article by Matteo Manferdini.

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under MIT license