OwlExpress

Inspiration

Currently the college coordinators are in charge of sorting packages and notifying students. It is a tedious and also error-prone job for the busy coordinators. We would like to help by replacing this rather manual process with a more automated mobile application.

How it works

The coordinator can take a picture of the label on a package, and that is all he/she needs to do. Our system will identify the student from the label and send him/her a notification email with the picture of that package attached.

Challenges I ran into

We built a large part of our project from scratch without readily-available APIs. We were also experiencing a lot of dependency issues, which consumed a lot of our development time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We make a REST web service as the back end that can support all the mobile and web apps as the front end. Currently we have built the IOS app, and we would like to push our project to RiceApps in the future to build the Android and Windows Phone client.

What I learned

How to make the back-end extensible by using REST web apis, getting rid of dependency issues and language limitations, decoupling the front and back end.

What's next for OwlExpress

Push to Rice apps where Rice students work together in every week for some interesting projects. Make logging website, and make Android, Windows Phone client.