Applying the App

By Grace Zhong

Q: What are you building and how would you describe this project?

Gage: This app is essentially a cross between Instagram and Evite. The goal is to be able to invite people to real-life events and filter their feeds based on location so that we can promote community and activity in the real world.

Zander: With the pandemic, we saw a giant decrease in the amount of socialization that young people were getting and there was a huge gap in the market for an app like this that would really allow people to engage socially with a community without facing rejection.

Gage: For me, this independent project entails learning the basics of Swiftui, Apple’s user interface language, because we’re really starting from scratch here and then building up our skills so then we can make a finalized product over the summer with some hard work.

Zander: For me, I have a little bit of experience with both the stu of this genre so I just put together an express server, which is a framework on the JavaScript language to serve requests for the app.

Q: How would you describe the process of building an app?

Gage: As to the specifics of coding a user interface, which is my part of the independent project, it’s about making multiple files that each stack di erent pieces that you see on the screen, such as colors, and arrange them into a way that is somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

Zander: For me, this process is largely just like putting together di erent routes that a computer can make requests to on the server. When you have your URL and you type that into Google or like “apple.com,” there’s something called the server’s IP address in your route. And your router talks to that IP address on some files back to your computer through something we know as the internet. There are di erent places on that server that you can make requests to and what I have done is opened up a single port on the server which allows you to include di erent information in the request that you are making.

Q: How do you envision the app being used on the Thacher campus?

Gage: On the Thacher campus, our app has many interesting applications. So the post function is when you post di erent events and it can be used for all kinds of events, and clubs. Indoor Committee (a group that plans school events) would probably have a huge impact on campus and so would smaller clubs that can also use it to advertise their event and make their event look more interesting. It would be used instead of the mass emails that are sent because we know that our inboxes are way too flooded already.

Q: Where do you see this going in the future?

Zander: Facebook.

Gage: Purchased by Meta for $5.6 billion. Nah. Ideally, it would be ready by the spring of our senior year, but we don’t know what roadblocks we will run into and how much time we will have in the college process. Hopefully, we can do a soft launch on the app store, then a big launch that will hopefully bring the app to college campuses. Then the students can naturally transition into them, continuing using the app to get to know people in their area when traveling for work. All of this is speculation and we are still a long way o .

Q: Any last messages?

Gage: Building an app is hard. Don’t take it lightly and it’s going to take up a lot of time. It’s also fun and grows my mind in ways I’ve never imagined. I highly recommend it if you are willing to put in the time. It has made me a lot smarter and more capable than I was before.