Apple picks up UNCW apps

It’s a big break for some students at UNCW. Just last week, a group of computer science majors got approval from Apple for an i-Phone application they’ve been working on for the past eight months.

Developing these apps started off as a school project, and it became much tougher than they expected. Now they’ve gotten the hang of it, and two of the students even started a business to hopefully make a profit.

“Several students approached me last spring semester and were interested in working on developing i-Phone applications,” said UNCW professor Ron Vetter, PhD.

UNCW signed up for a free account with apple’s university developer program and they got to work.

“We bought some books, we got the software loaded, we bought ourselves a few i-Phones which we didn’t have and by the end of the spring semester, we had learned just enough to build our first application,” Vetter said.

Now eight months later, two students got Apple’s approval for an app they developed together called i-Acrostic.

It’s a game i-Phone users can download for $.99 that generates an acrostic poem or word puzzle for each letter of a word you enter.

The project, which began as independent studies, inspired the two undergrads to form a company specializing in i-Phone development. Three more apps are already awaiting Apple’s approval.

One is a free app called “UNCW” that students and teachers should be able to download by next week. With the app, they’ll stay up-to-date on campus news, activities, and events. They can even watch videos from UNCW’s Youtube channel, like a clip from last week’s Beach Blast.

Another free app called the i-Tour was created for prospective students who can’t make it to scheduled campus tours.

The mastermind behind this app is Camilo Alvarez who has been working closely with the admissions department to obtain campus information.

Developing these apps proved to be much more challenging than these computer science students expected.

“I have to Google everything and there’s no answers for anything, if you have a problem, you’re kind of on your own, you have to figure it out go at it ‘til you get it right,” said Seahawk student Ricardo Valea.

For every app a person downloads, Apple gets thirty percent, and the developers or students and teachers in this case get the other seventy.