UNCW/Jamie Moncrief
by Courtney West ’10
Students create iPhone applications Everyday there are more than 100,000 iPhone applications available for download at the touch of a button. Thanks to Phillip Whisenhunt ’10 and Ricardo Valea ’10, UNCW now has its own iPhone application to access information about upcoming campus events and university news and view UNCW YouTube videos. UNCW was one of the first universities in the world to have a mobile application available on iTunes. Valea and Whisenhunt share the iPhone spotlight with graduate student Camilo Alvarez ’05 who introduced his iTour application this fall. The new application is targeted towards prospective students and their parents who are unable to attend formal campus tours. It incorporates Google maps that enable the individual to virtually navigate around campus. To keep up with the rising student interest in iPhone applications, UNCW now offers an iPhone application class taught by Eric Patterson along with Valea, his former student. The course is a high level programming class aimed at teaching the skills and language to write iPhone applications. As an added bonus, students can use their knowledge to create applications for Apple’s newest gadget, the iPad. After successfully launching two iPhone applications, Whisehunt, Valea and Alvarez were inspired to start their own software development company called BoomCo. The company specializes in the development and design of iPhone applications. Already the partners have released several applications including the North Carolina Child Support Calculator, which helps divorce attorneys calculate child support dues for their clients, and iAcrostic, a fun interactive game that creates an acrostic poem for the text you enter.