Forty-two drafts and 300 hours later and the College of Media and Communication application is now available for download.
Carlos Alban and Sami Suteria, computer engineering students, won the App-athon last semester and were later contacted in May by CoMC to develop an app for the college. Working through different versions since June, Alban said the most challenging part was the programming language.
“They don’t teach this programming language at Tech, it’s called Objective C,” Alban said. “And so I’d never had experience programming in this language until this project.”
With all the work the developers put into the app they’re happy to have something to show on their resumes. They said they learned some valuable lessons for the real world.
“Negotiating and how to plan ahead,” Alban said.
The developers met repeatedly with representatives from the college to decide what sort of things were going to go into the app and determine how it was going to look which ended up costing the team more time.
“Yeah you need to really think about what you want in the app beforehand because we got like half way done and then they’re like, ‘Oh yeah we want all this extra stuff also,” Suteria said. “I should have been more clear about it too been like, ‘Hey this is exactly what’s getting in there.’ I was kind of lose about everything.”
The app includes plenty of things outside of the college, such as information on campus parking lots, the library, and an academic calendar, with plans to include Raiderlink and information from the Rec Center in future versions of the app.
“I think we’re overachievers and there’s always more we can do,” Alban said.
Suteria would agree.
“I just wanted to release it and go on to the next version,” Suteria said.
Suteria hopes to get a lot of feedback from users to see what they can improve on for the next version
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