Women’s March 2017: Turning Inspiration into Swift3 Code
At the start of the month I was in a bit of a coding funk. Perhaps it was the two weeks of holiday in Los Angeles and all the delicious tacos 🌮 I was eating on a daily basis, but I just couldn’t get pumped about the app I was building.
It wasn’t until mid-month that I (late) found out more about the Women’s March on Washington that I found my inspiration. If you’re unfamiliar with this event, the Women’s March on Washington was a gathering of women (or anyone who wanted to represent!) who came to D.C. to march on Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration.
As soon as I heard about this event, I immediately looked at the Women’s March website and made plans to travel to DC and participate. The website was clean and informative, but I noticed that there wasn’t a Women’s App app in the App Store. While the website had a lot of information about the march Unity Principles and how to donate, it didn’t have a lot of “day-of” information, such as the march route, or parking & bathroom facilities.
So, with my newly acquired coding skills at hand, I start to build an app for the Women’s March. The app I made only included 5 views with a tab bar controller to navigate between them. I wanted to make an app that was simple, not too word-heavy, and useful for finding local DC info all in one spot.
For the home view, I used the DarkSky API to get an hourly DC temperature and summary update. Full disclosure: the images were taken from the Women’s March website, so the teeny tiny print at the bottom of the home was my way of giving them credit.
Although a ticket wasn’t needed for the march, the organizers asked people to register for the event so they could have an accurate headcount. Here, I used a webView to display the Google Form Women’s March register page.
I also included a FAQ page with some information I gathered from the official website and this Vogue article. With the help of Tameika Lawrence, it was built as a scrollView with multiple labels for Q’s and A’s. (Thank you, Tameika!)
In my opinion, the most important feature of the app was the mapView, which included the locations of 1) the meeting point 2) transgender friendly bathrooms and 3) parking garages. For the bathroom data, I used the Refuge Restroom API and for parking info, I used the Google Places API with the search words “parking” and “parkinggarage.” The adorable icons are from Icons8 — I love their icons!
Lastly, being unfamiliar with the DC Metro system, I wanted to include a subway map. I found the @wmata Metro map, inserted it into an imageView and then added a pinch gesture recognizer to the imageView (to enable zooming in and out).
This app took me about 3 days and was really fun to make. I enjoyed making an app that I knew people (me) would find useful. More than that, I worked quickly because I knew the march was in less than 7 days and needed to be finished soon.
In the end though, the Women’s March published their Official App five days before the march, so I decided not to push my app to the App Store. Overall, I’m happy with the app I built and I’m glad that I found a source of inspiration to get my fingers moving.
Most importantly, I’m happy that I was able to participate in the Women’s March and contribute to this movement. I marched for several reasons and never imagined the positive and hopeful energy I would experience. I left the march feeling inspired and motivated to write code and build programs that are not only cool, but help improves peoples’ lives and bring them together.
Leave me a comment below and tell me what inspires you to code.
You can find my repo here.
