As the lunch bell rings, upperclassmen rush out to the parking lot, eager to grab food before their next class. One of them, senior Michael Guo, scrambles into his car and pulls up the Timely app on his phone. He types in “fast” and selects “40 minutes. In a few seconds, he is on the way to La Cueva Mexican Grill, four miles away and a nine minute drive from school.

“[Timely is] a really useful and simple app,” Guo said. “And what makes it even more awesome is that one of my good friends made it.”

Timely, created by senior Aakash Thumaty, allows users to find places to eat at within a certain timeframe. Users can input a search term (i.e., Indian, Mexican, fast) and how much time they have, and the app will then generate a list of restaurants that fit the criteria.

“I was inspired to build the app [after] observing students at our school [during lunch],” Thumaty said. “I figured the app would at least partially make going off campus for lunch a bit easier.”

Thumaty spent approximately three weeks working on the app last November and created its functionality by using a combination of FourSquare, a Yelp-like startup that allows users to check in at specific locations, and Google Maps for the application’s programming interface.

According to Thumaty, the process of coding the app wasn’t difficult for him, since he had previously shipped three other apps to the Apple App Store, including Shape Match in the beginning of 2015 and Yo From and Colors in 2014.

Instead, what Thumaty found most difficult was deciding what information was most essential to users.  Above all, he wanted to minimize the number of features and keep the app simplistic.

“You can have an app with a million features, but people will only find it too complicated,” Thumaty said. “People come to an app with a certain purpose, and as app developers, we have to cater to that.”

With this in mind, Thumaty created his app with limited features, but the app still has gained approximately 5,000 active users. Thumaty said it is better to provide an app and try to satisfy a small community of people like his peers than try to make it perfect for everybody.

Out of all the app’s features, the biggest addition to the app was the time-dot graph, a visual timeline that maps out the estimated time required by the user to drive to a restaurant, eat and drive back, since it seemed to be the most useful feature for users. At first, this feature was planned to be placed in the “detail” view of the app, but was moved to the main table view because of its convenience.

Because Thumaty said he was trying to help people in Saratoga specifically, he wanted input from his fellow peers on every aspect of the app, from design to functionality. His friends, seniors Helen Chen and Spencer Yen, contributed to the design and optimization of the interface, respectively. Yen, for example, proposed the time-dot graph.

“I suggested where to implement and highlight certain features so that they would be able to provide the most appeal to users,” Yen said.

Thumaty also sought more feedback from the school by contacting principal Paul Robinson, who had mentioned Timely in one of his recent Week at a Glance emails. Through Robinson’s email, Thumaty was able to gather feedback from his peers. Many of the suggestions he received dealt with potential new features like average wait times at destinations.

In the future, Thumaty hopes to receive more feedback from others to help him gather ideas for updates on his old apps, while also offering inspiration for new app ideas.

“Whenever I come across a problem, I want to be able to build something that solves it, and then distribute it to the world,” Thumaty said. “I’m happy with the overall result of what I worked to create, and I hope users find it to be useful in their everyday lives.”