Go green! Go green! Go green!
That motto was drilled into my mind when I was at the age of 15. Lion Alan Thoo, the district chairperson for the Leo Clubs at that time, was so passionate on trying to help the Earth by going green that it rubbed off on most of the Leo members of West Peninsular Malaysia.
Fast forward 8 years, as I’m sitting on my chair facing my computer, thinking of a personal project I could work on. That motto struck me again. What if I can build a React Native app that allows users to carpool?
I went on to the iOS app store and search around. There was a carpooling app already. Nice try, Keith. Maybe next time you’ll come up with an original idea.
Then I started thinking to myself, what if this carpooling app allows users to carpool with their existing facebook friends rather than random strangers. If I wanted to go to New York, I’d probably ride with Melissa from college than a random Mary from the area right. I mean, Melissa from college is definitely not as harmful as compared to Mary right? Plus, JC (our student government association president) has asked me to try to develop something like this for the college before.
So off I went to try to build something cool.
GoDrive… You get it? Cause some people is looking to go somewhere, some people are gonna drive? I know, I know. Helluva creative.
Designing is always the toughest stage. It’s always easier to build whatever you can see, but to design something from scratch ain’t as easy as it sounds. Especially when the only art you do is wedding cinematography. I knew what I wanted though. I wanted an app with a minimalistic look and simple to understand and navigate.
Choosing the font was the best part. Discovering, and learning different fonts from different articles allow me to broaden my typography knowledge which was limited to Century Gothic only.
I went with Montserrat because it gave a very minimalistic look. The auth screen was interesting, as I try to figure out whether I should always have it as “Login with Facebook”, or have it with “Sign up with Facebook”, cause technically, you do have a facebook account, and the process of login in or signing up with facebook is literally the same.
Getting a minimalist design is not easy, so I decided to get inspiration from some real artist. Which got me to Javi Perez’s Marline App which is incredibly minimal and beautiful. It definitely distracted me for 20 minutes, as I stopped and just appreciated how he made his app that beautiful. Let’s get back on topic though.
The Go page shows users who wants to go to a specific place and where they are from. For example, the first item would be “Keith is looking for a ride to Nashville and he is from Allentown”. Where as the Drive page shows people who are driving to places. For example, the second item on the Drive list would be “Keith is driving to Texas from Las Vegas, if you want to go to Texas too, just pay me some money and hop on in”. If only Keith is gonna drive for free, then the world would become a better place.
The time is placed down at the bottom because most people are always late nowadays (You included Keith!), and it just reminds people of the time so that they aren’t late to their carpooling ride.
And if we were to click on one of the item on the list. We would be guided into a “Request” page which allows users to request for a ride. I figured giving all the details like, how many seats left, how far away Keith is from me (0 distance, cause I’m always in Keith’s heart, cause I am Keith) and how much the driver wants you to pay him would probably be a good idea. And you can also see who’s riding along, so if you despise a person, you just don’t ride in that freaking car. Makes life a whole lot easier for everyone.
You click the request button and it will let you send a message to the driver. Again, this is a community app, so we gotta teach people to be polite and all. Plus, you don’t wanna flirt with the driver. We don’t want our app to be the result of more kinkiness in this world ;)
Not only that, we also allows users to check out other’s profile! How many times they hitch a ride from others (left with paw icon) and how many times they drove others (right with car icon). Oh, not forgetting a cute caption that they can put in if they want to. Please, don’t call me Kitty Kat, that was some random caption I thought of based on the only photo I have.
And finally…
A create screen so that we can create rides! Genius(lazy) me decided to reuse the same design from requesting so that everything is coherent. The only difference is that users are able to click on components and change the value of it. Also, I was so excited when I could change the font of the scrollable time. Shoutout to XGFE for the awesome react-native-datepicker api!
Working on this app was definitely fun. Until I received a call from a friend from India, telling me that there is an app that is very similar to mine. ==
There goes my innovation.
So I kind of just left it there. I was even ready to put some real reducers in. But hey, next project, here I come!
P.S. don’t call me Kitty Kat. Seriously.
P.P.S if you’re interested in working on this project, shoot me a DM.
Hope you guys enjoy this read. Clappppp for mee if you did ;)
