It began with a dinner conversation between Max Koskoff and Lee Peters while at a conference, when Koskoff proposed the idea of engaging the school community by utilizing twitter.
Over a year and a half and 700 downloads later, on January 11, the University began doing so when they released the UH Mobile app, available on the App Store and Google Marketplace.
Based off of the University’s system for recording grades, financing and, “everything else in the world we do here,” Koskoff said, Banner, the app provides a directory, events calendar, news, campus links, grades and schedule features.
“Banner’s parent company Lucian built the app as the framework and then we put our information and our code into that framework,” Koskoff said. “Lucien provided the framework…[Lucien] had the idea that, ‘Hey, this is what a lot of schools are doing.’”
With that framework available, Koskoff, along with Peters, set out to get the information for the app.
“Lee and I put together all of the map information, we were more data collectors in the sense of figuring out what is where,” Koskoff said. “We also put together the student services tabs and again, trying to figure out what departments we want on this.”
Koskoff went on to say, “We were in general the information collectors, but a lot of credit goes to ITS in building the code for it.”
With Koskoff and Lee gathering the information, and ITS writing the code, the app was hoped to be out before the end of fall semester last year, however ran into approval difficulties.
“It was suppose to be Midnight Mania, that app itself was kind of done for Midnight Mania, it was built,” Koskoff said. “However, when we did our original timeline, we expected Apple to go two to three weeks with the turnaround. Apple actually took about four months for a turnaround, with several different versions of the app.”
According to Koskoff, the turnaround from Apple, or approval to distribute the app, took so long because of the standards they have on what they allow in their app store and what defines an app.
“They want to see very native features to the phone, to make it good, to make an app worth having in their app store,” he said. “Whenever we submitted [a version of the app], [apple] got back to us, the said, ‘It just isn’t what we’re up to,’…and it was mostly we weren’t using native phone functions like using geolocation, slide using calendar.”
Having said that he thought the app turned out great, despite the several revisions it took, Koskoff said that everything that was suppose to be in version, got in it.
The Twitter feature of the app in this version, available through the campus links icon, already works with engaging the community, according to Koskoff, but does so with the use of the hash-tag “#uharthawklife.” Any tweets that display in the twitter will be tweets that use that hashtag.
Another feature that requires students effort, the Self-Service Center, requires student to log in everytime they wish to use it. Such is the case Koskoff said, for security reasons, so that if someone were to lose their phone, the phone-finder person would not have instant access to that original phone users information.
Anything else that they want in the app, Koskoff said stay tuned for version two, such as a photostream.
“We are working on a photostream project for version two, called ‘Hawks in Flight’ in which you can take pictures at an event or wherever you are on campus that shows school spirit, being committed to the community or even just spelling out Hawks or posing as a Hawk, and you can upload it to the system, and the rest of the community of app users can see it and then comment on it more and inspire others,” Koskoff said.
As for when version two will be out, Koskoff said hopefully by the start of the freshmen orientations. However, until then, Koskoff said students should just download the app and explore it.