5C Menu iPhone App

June 2, 2012

At the Claremont Colleges, pretty much everyone eats at the dining halls all four years. My freshman year, I had the idea of putting creating an iPhone app for the dining hall menus. That summer, I tried and failed. In fact, the following summer I tried and failed yet again. Then, my junior year at Harvey Mudd, I started to figure it out. Objective-C and its incredibly object-orientated nature was totally foreign to me. At this point, I had only taken an introductory computer science course.

I implemented this app using Google App Engine (GAE) to run a python script that parses the dining hall menus periodically, formatting the data into XML and JSON. I used python because there is an awesome library called Beautiful Soup for parsing HTML trees. The code is publicly available on Github.

You can find this app on the App Store, but it hasn't been working lately – apparently the dining hall websites have changed causing the parser to break. I haven't dealt with it since. If you are interested in helping on this front, feel free to contact me.

If I were to rewrite this app, I would make a web app using Meteor's epic Cordova integration to port over to all mobile platforms. I would also use Import.io to extract the data because the python parser sadly took the most time of anything and now its basically worthless.