Tripper is an iOS AI travel planner app. It provides users with a list of photos of cities, where the user can select whether he is Interested/ is Not interested/ has Went & Liked/ has Went & dislike the place shown to him. Given the user's answers, the app will get a sense of the user's travel style and preferred kind of destinations, and then generate suggestions based on his answers.
demo-1.mp4
I never tried developing mobile applications before, and since my unemployement stint has been longer than I thought, I figured that I should finally pick my lazy ass up and learn something related to it. The reason for choosing Swift is simply because 1. I am an iPhone user, and 2. as someone who has been playing with React almost everyday, I wanted to try somehting outside of the JS ecosystem. It turned out to be a really fufilling experience, learning a new language, state management in SwiftUI, etc. I was very glad that SwiftUI provided so many customizable components available that makes it easy to build stuff, rather than having to compare 1 package to another everytime when creating web apps using React.
Next, I wanted to do build something related to AI, and I figured that building an app similar to ChatGPT but integrating more fun features sounds like a good start that should not take too much time. This was definitely a fun experience playing with OpenAI's API (though it might costed me a chicken rice meal), and I am definitely keen on levearaging more on LLMs on other apps I build in the future.
Lastly, as a travel maniac, I like to scroll on social media to get inspired on where to travel to next. Hence, I was brainstorming along the ideas on how to make this process more fun and interesting.
- Swift, SwiftUI, Firebase
- Everything related to Swift and SwiftUI:
- State management (
@State,@Binding, etc) - Use of guards to deal with Optionals
- Many SwiftUI's components
- Making API requests in Swift
- MVVM
- State management (
- Using Firebase Authentication to authenticate users and Firebase FireStore
- Use of OpenAI and dealing with streaming data so that users can see response as it is being generated by the bot rather than just seeing a loading spinner for 1min+
Future improvements will be done when time permits:
- Features
- Animations: I can't seem to get animation to work. Ideally, I want the cards to be swiped out of the phone screen on a button click.
- UI design. Man I really need a UI Designer to help man
- Continuing of chat: When the bot returns an initial response, allow user to continue to talk to it to get deepeer insights
- Make use of iOS specific features maybe like Core Location, CoreML just to play around to make this app more fun.
- Store images and cities data in some storage and retrieve them through an API or something -> I didn't wanted to do this for my MVP because it was something I am familiar with and I wanted to play with mainly new things I never tried before.
- Improve on the formatting of the bot's response. Currently seems like there might be inconsistencies in the format 20% of the time.
- Code stuff
- Code refractoring -> I tried my best to follow MVVM but I think it could be done better for certain parts