- Mobile App
ΣΗΜΜΥ Results
Android app that polled for and displayed university exam results as soon as they were posted.
What it does
This was a small Android app, for students of my university, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ΣΗΜΜΥ) in the National Technical University of Athens. The app kept polling a forum thread that tracked published exam results, and showed a notification when new results were available.Why I built it
Back then, the digital setup of our university in this aspects was not super advanced. Exam results were just printed and posted outside the professor’s office. So, students were used to just pass by, and when they saw the results, would let others know.
Soon, a forum thread was created for every exam period, and students would post there that “X course results are out”. The issue was though, that when the results would come out was a big mystery. It ranged from a week to 3 months!
So, I decided I didn’t want to just have to remember forever to check this post every now and then, I would much prefer my phone to do it for me. Moreover, I wanted to learn the basics of Android development, as Android was by far the dominant smartphone OS in Greece.
How it's built
Built natively in Java with the Android SDK, using the Android Studio. The app periodically polled the forum thread, and when there was a new post, notified the user, and showed the thread in a simple list view. The users had a few options to choose how often the app would check.Challenges / What I learned
This was the first thing I ever developed and actually published, while still a student. This meant that I didn’t only learn Android development. I got exposed for the first time to the full lifecycle of software: starting from the idea, building it, publishing it and improving it. I had to deal with the Android Play Store and all the policies and the bureaucracy this entails, the issues that came up on different devices, and I got feedback from real users about something I built.
All in all, a simple app, that thankfully has become outdated now, but one I will always remember as the first useful thing I built.