Victoria Hurley-Schubert

By: centraljersey.com
Lost on campus? Looking for a Princeton University event? There’s an app for that.
Three Princeton University students developed an application for the iPhone that lists and maps all university events as a project for a computer programming class last semester.
The app, called "MYMapp, Princeton edition," gets it’s information from Point, an intra-campus web-based calendar for university events.
"All the student groups submit upcoming events to Point and it’s something everybody uses at some point," said Matt Salesi, a computer science major from Toms River. "After freshman year not many people end up using it, it’s not as convenient as it could be. We thought this would be an interesting way to make it convenient, just pull out the phone and open the app."
"Surprisingly, no one else was doing anything related to iPhone applications," added Mr. Salesi. "We went through a bunch of terrible ideas," looking for an idea that would be useful after the project was complete.
Working out the programming took about six weeks, and was a hands-on learning experience for the three students. "We started completely from scratch and that was one of the more interesting components of the project-none of us knew anything about iPhone programming when we started," said Mr. Salesi, who figured out how to design an algorithm to have locations entered into Princeton’s Point system show up on the app map. "The first step was thinking of all the stuff we wanted and how feasible it was; the next step was trying to speed-learn how to do all that in six weeks."
The iPhone app automatically uploads the information from Point, shows you where you are and where your event is. The app map is Google Map-based. "At one point we had to sit down with the Google map open on our computer and put pins down on all the locations we thought we might need to get the GPS locations and that’s how we were eventually able to map everything," said Yu-Han Hsu, a molecular biology major from Taiwan who moved to Princeton as a teen.
Mapping all the locations was the toughest part of the project, said Michele Capece, a finance major from Springfield. "When people would submit events to Point there wasn’t a dropdown list of buildings to pick from, they could put ‘enter’ whatever they wanted, so we would get places like the field in front of Frist or really random things, so we had to map those to actual locations on campus."
"That was one of the most interesting things, designing a program that could parse those things and give you the right information," added Mr. Salesi. "Sometimes people misspell names, some people call the same building different names, so it’s hard getting the computer to recognize variations of the same name, so we were able to find a good way to tackle that."
Once they worked through the programming and mapping, the threesome had to appeal to Apple and gain approval for their app to appear in the company’s online App Store, a place where Apple users can go to get programs for their Apple products. "There’s a big approval process; a lot of people want to have their apps on the App Store, but Apple doesn’t want apps that make their phone look bad or that don’t work right. We had to submit our finished app to Apple and wait while their reviewers tested the app and made sure it did what we said it did and conformed to their interface guidelines and looks like an app is supposed to look. We provided support materials like a website and additional information for users to figure out how to use it."
Another surprising benefit of learning to program iPhone apps is that other people are asking them to help make apps. Their next project is to collaborate with the university’s dining services. "They’re thinking about making something similar to what we already have," said Ms. Hsu. "We didn’t include any dining information and they’re thinking of having dining information like hours, menus, stuff like vending machine locations, so that’s what we’ve been working on the past few weeks."
About 150 people downloaded the free app over the summer and the three seniors hope more students, especially freshmen, begin to use it as the school year gets under way.