Application developer’s club works on next big project

After the release of the SHS App on Sept. 27, the Application Developer’s club has been working on its next project: creating an app for The Saratoga Falcon’s website.

“I initially talked about the idea with [journalism adviser Mike] Tyler and he thought it was a great idea,” senior club president Sujay Khandekar said.

The newspaper app requires a different approach to the coding. Instead of storing all the information in the phone like in the SHS App, articles are stored in the Falcon’s web server and must be pulled from there.

“The format will most probably be the same tab bar interface as seen in the SHS App,” Khandekar said. “However, the biggest change will be that it will have to be more dynamic since new stories are always published regularly.”

The main goal of the newspaper app is to allow students to read Falcon stories on their phones or tablets. The developers are working to create a local database that caches, or stores, articles so they can be read without an Internet connection.

“[The Falcon App] is a fun opportunity for me to explore webservers and the inner workings of a newspaper database, being outside of journalism,” senior Eugene Che said.
The club hopes to release the Falcon App in early February.

Another project the club is working on is an electronic version of the goldenrod textbook forms.

The club hopes that the app will replace the existing paper goldenrods and expects to have a version ready for testing by February.

According to Che, the club is a good experience for people with all sorts of coding backgrounds and those new to coding can learn from other members and tutorials posted on the club website. Students familiar with a language can help beginners and develop apps of their own.

“We found that teaching everyone how to code [in organized sessions] was inefficient and took way too much time to get anything done,” Che said. “Instead we do it outside of class so if people have questions they just ask people who are more veteran at the process.”

The club is making great progress with each app, learning the process and helping the community at the same time.

“The long-term goal is to push out as many apps onto the AppStore and Google Play Store as we can,” Khandekar said.