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Students develop OU iPhone application
By Julianna Parker Jones
Freshmen holding campus maps, trying desperately to find their new classes in a foreign environment. It's a common sight the first week of school at the University of Oklahoma.
This year, however, students had a new kind of tool to find their way around campus.
Instead of using bulky paper maps, students pulled out their iPhones, found where they were on the map by GPS triangulation and then navigated around a virtual campus map with a touch of their finger.
The University of Oklahoma released its official iPhone application, OU2GO, just before the start of school, and it's been a hit, at least with lost freshmen.
Freshman Jenny Perry said she's used the map feature of the iPhone in her first week at OU.
"I like it 'cause it shows you the actual picture of what the building looks like," she said. "And I have absolutely no sense of direction, so it helps me."
In addition to the interactive map feature, the application provides weather information, an OU news feed, access to OU's YouTube channel, KGOU radio and campus information. It is available in the iTunes application store.
As of Tuesday night, 4,376 people had downloaded OU2GO onto their Apple iPhones or iPod Touches in 21 countries, said Kim Saylor, strategic analyst at the Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth.
That's great news for the team that developed the application -- all of whom are students.
A group of 11 students developed the ideas for the application, built it from scratch and handled the legal and marketing side of the project.
Saylor said she knew of only 10 other universities with official iPhone apps. Stanford was the first to develop one, and the students who built theirs spun off into an independent company that produced apps for several other universities.
It seemed only right that OU should have an application.
"I felt there were a lot of people around the university saying, 'Well, why not? Why don't we have one?'" Saylor said.
So CCEW was given the job of figuring out how to create one. CCEW participated in the project with Public Affairs, IT, Web Communications, the President's Office and the College of Engineering.
Saylor said it made financial sense to use students to create the app, in addition to the fact it gave students a learning experience.
"My favorite thing about this project is that it was a universitywide effort that in the end was executed by students, and I like that OU is the kind of institution that gives students that opportunity," she said.
The students who worked on the project participated in a summer internship to create the application by a start-of-school deadline.
The project was coordinated by CCEW, and five CCEW interns worked on the business side of the project.
Sean Bramble, finance and entrepreneurship senior, was one of those interns. He worked with Saylor to prepare a presentation that would convince the OU licensing committee to make the application the official OU app.
"We thought we would have a big advantage by being the official OU application," Bramble said. He said he's glad he helped develop the application -- something not many students can say they've done. He also said he's proud of how it turned out.
"We were really -- I wouldn't say surprised -- but we were very pleased at the response," he said.
The CCEW interns were joined in the project by six computer science students who wrote the code for the application.
The students were in unfamiliar territory building the application, said Kelly Tran, computer science graduate student. None had written code for Macs before, she said. But the opportunity to work with something new is what attracted her to the project.
"So being able to expose yourself to something new (was why she wanted to participate), and it's a new technology, it's going to be huge in the future," Tran said.
The computer science students spent the first month of the summer just learning the Mac operating system environment and how to write code for iPhones from computer science professor Dean Hougen. Then the students built the app in a month and a half.
Tran is staying with the project this school year, and she'll work on updates for the app as feedback comes in. But the feedback's been positive so far, especially considering the scope of the project that the students accomplished.
"In house, by OU students -- and we are the first in the Big 12 to do that," Tran said. "And all us computer science interns, we never made an application before and we did it in a month and a half. So it was a very huge accomplishment."