An app‑etizing contender: Food software wins Dal mobile app competition

- April 4, 2013

App competition winner Casey Yu shows off "DalEats." (Danny Abriel photos)
App competition winner Casey Yu shows off "DalEats." (Danny Abriel photos)

It’s an app that works for dessert too.

Of course, in this case, “app” is short for application, but “DalEats,” which won Dal’s second-annual mobile app competition, certainly appealed to the foodies who dropped by the Goldberg Computer Science Building last Thursday.

The idea of the competition, hosted by the Faculty of Computer Science, is to challenge some of Dal’s best student programmers and developers by having them develop a functioning mobile app in less than a month. Specifically, the students were asked to design an app to benefit some portion of the Dal community, be it current or prospective students, faculty and staff, alumni or the surrounding community.

DalEats, developed by CS student Casey Yu, is a food app that allows students to track their dining on campus.

“It would include all the dining hall menus, as well as all the health information about the food,” she explained. “You can even subscribe to your favourite foods and get alerts when they’re going to be served.”

The app was one of many that impressed the judges, whose ranks included Vice-President Academic and Provost Carolyn Watters, Vice-President Finance and Administration Ken Burt and Assistant Vice-President Student Academic Success Services Meri Kim Oliver.

“You really blew everyone away,” said Dr. Watters. “Just a terrific set of apps made in a very short period of time.”

Making Yu’s win all the more impressive is that while many of the entries were by a team of students, hers was a solo effort. For her work, she received the competition's top prize of $750.

An impressive app spread


Don’t go looking for DalEats or any of the other dozen or so competition entries on your favourite app store just yet: these were prototypes, although some of them seemed rather complete considering the students had only a month to work on them. The competition’s organizers did encourage the students to continue working on their apps and consider pitching them to the appropriate Dal department. (There were representatives from across the university on hand to check out the winners.)



“Tiger Connect,” developed by Will Blades and Noah Tong won second prize ($500) in the competition. It allows students to collect social media feeds related to Dal — from Dal News to the DSU — and pick the ones they want to follow in a single convenient location.

“Right now it’s mostly Twitter feeds, but the idea would be that it would bring in as much Dal content from the Internet you want, sharing more about what’s happening in the community,” explained Blades.
 
Third prize, $250, was awarded to “DalScholaris” by Philip Yeo, Mei Kuan Wong and Guatambir Chawla. The app lets users stay logged into EZproxy while searching for results on Google Scholar, meaning they don’t have to enter their Dal credentials multiple times.

“You can view all the articles you have access to right on your tablet,” said Chawla. “It’s about making life easier.”

The people’s choice award, which also came with a $250 prize, went to Skizzo, a campus map application that not only guides users to buildings on campus, but to individual rooms within the buildings.

“It brings up the floor plans and marks the room for you,” explained Tyler Pachal, who developed the app with Jonathan Wong and Brenden Krochko. Their app also displays its navigation text in 13 different languages.

Other apps in the competition included a mobile Dal Card, an app for Dal Online content and a community polling app that showed the latest results on a real-life weighted scale.

The prizes were sponsored by the President's Office and Student Services.


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