RULost? New Rutgers App Has an Answer

Rutgers students with Apple iPhones and spare change can buy an app designed to help them navigate the New Brunswick Campus – both its information highways and physical byways.

The app, developed last semester by students in the Rutgers School of Engineering, is available for 99 cents from the Apple’s App Store. It works on any Apple iOS device – iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. From the home screen, users can easily find out when the next campus bus is due and check the day’s menu at the dining halls. They can get a short list of important university and community phone numbers and web links, and they can browse The Daily Targum, the student newspaper.

“Our goal is to provide customers the ability to access all that Rutgers has to offer in a very simple, easy-to-use fashion,” said Kyle Sherman, software engineer and leader of the team that created “RULost” – an app obviously aimed at keeping its users from becoming so. “We wanted to provide them with one central location to get all the information they need and to use the bus system without any hassle.”

As of mid-August, more than 600 customers have downloaded RULost. Not a blockbuster yet, Sherman admits, but it’s a good start when he considers that all he and his fellow developers did to market the app before leaving campus last spring was post a few flyers and create a Facebook page.

The team acknowledges some early profitability. App developers get 70 percent of the sales and Apple keeps 30 percent. An unobtrusive advertising banner at the bottom of the home screen adds a bit of revenue. Expenses include Apple’s initial $99 listing fee and ongoing web hosting fees.

The RULost implementation of NextBus was perhaps the team’s biggest challenge, yet one members felt was the program’s most important feature. Campus bus riders expressed how difficult it was to wade through several pages of information on standard web browsers to find their desired route and schedule. With RULost, the best route and bus times are a few screen taps away, starting with an oversized red button at the top of the app screen.

“All our features came out of frustrations we had or that others voiced concerns about,” said Sherman, a resident of Margate who will graduate in December with a degree in electrical and computer engineering. He is currently participating in a six-month School of Engineering co-op assignment, working full-time at Intel Corporation in Folsom, Calif.

The other app buttons – for phone numbers, web links, dining hall menus, and Targum articles –may look like they were easy to implement. After all, said Sherman, simplicity was the team’s goal. But to make that happen, members had to do a lot of research, programming, and in some cases, negotiation with other information providers.

The Targum button, for example, takes users right to the newspaper’s mobile web feed. But when the RULost developers tried to implement it on their app, they noticed it would take almost two minutes to load over a 3G data network because of the volume of content, especially photos and videos. The team’s software engineer e-mailed the Targum’s webmaster to alert him to the difficulty.

“The Targum people emailed us back right away and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll fix it right now,’” said Sherman. “Within days, it was ready to use.”

The five engineering students got their start last fall when they chose this as a capstone project in their senior software design class. They agreed that Rutgers students could benefit from a mobile campus guide like they’d seen for some other universities. Surprisingly, only one of these largely self-taught app programmers even owned an iPhone. Another owned an iPod Touch and yet another owned an Android phone, but two were not even smartphone users.

For the development process, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Rutgers Alumni Association furnished Macintosh computers to run Apple’s software development kit.

Going forward on their own, team members will continue to update the app and create new features, such as a sports section and a maps page. These, Sherman believes, will extend the app’s appeal beyond students, faculty, and staff to campus visitors and Scarlet Knights sports fans.

The other big update is adapting RULost for Android smartphones. The engineers have started work on an Andriod port, but they’re finding it a large task because they have to completely rewrite the app.

“Potential users are clamoring for it,” he said, recalling how 10 people a week would ask in person or on Facebook when the team would provide an Android version. Further marketing is also on the to-do list for the coming academic year.

Other members of the RULost team are Dave Buchman, the team’s project manager who is also in charge of server and back-end development and management; Joe Morreale, who served as software engineer; Dan Carew, who was responsible for the app’s design and usability; and Ryan Hennessey, who handled data management. All graduated last spring with degrees in electrical and computer engineering.