Nearly a year ago I hired a bright young man by the name of Will Sutton. Over the course of the following months Will and I made this – the official Saint Louis University iPhone App. (Which you are most welcome to download at iphone.slu.edu)
Will initially started from scratch, learning Objective-C and his way around XCode. Even more impressive was the fact that he really never used a Mac much before.
Like a fish to water he quickly had a rough prototype up and running. It was serviceable, but very, shall we say, rickety.
Then we were alerted to the existence of a great open-source app framework created at West Virgina University by then student Jared Crawford.
Will set about updating the framework with SLU specific data sources. We had to meet with legal, create icons and vet our data sources for reliability. With Jared’s awesome framework we were able to quickly turn around a tight first release of what I’m sure will be a vital asset to any SLU student.
Meanwhile the IT department was preparing to launch a mobile portal for some of the very same services. Like some superhero wonder group we joined forces and released our apps simultaneously. Being web-based their app has a much larger reach, but our app allows us to perform some hardware specific feats.
Our next step is to squash a few 1.0 bugs, update the app for the new Retina display and start adding additional features like dining information and athletic reports.
You can read more about the apps from this nice press release.