Many students have used (and been distracted by) applications like Angry Birds, Words with Friends and Temple Run. Meanwhile, some of their classmates are creating the applications that they purchase from the App Store.

Arthur Bogdanovich

Junior Arthur Bogdanovich started designing applications for Android during his freshman year with the intention of becoming a computer programmer. He started out with simple on/off switch applications to get familiar with the operating system, but he progressively built his way up to creating applications that are currently on the market.

“I used Youtube videos to help me learn the first parts,” Arthur said. “Later on, I used technical books with documentation about the programming language that I use.”

Arthur made his simple applications more sophisticated by building up his features. He chose to advance the capabilities of his previous application rather than creating a new one altogether.

“I just sit down and think of things that might be useful to include and take the apps that I’ve made currently and add on to them,” Arthur said.

Arthur said he chose to program applications for Android because it is cheaper and he would have a larger degree of freedom.

After getting the counselors’ approval, Arthur started working with the Tech Club to create a task manager that will allow students to easily organize upcoming assignments and tests for their classes. It will tie in with SIS to create a more uniform information system. And most importantly, it’s a planner that can’t be lost.

Jerry Liu

Junior Jerry Liu is helping a company create an Android equivalent of its photo share social network application, which is currently available on the Apple App Store. The application allows anyone to post photo assignments on a certain topic or event. Followers can then comment and respond.

The process of creating an Android application isn’t as simple as copying and pasting from the IOS to Android. The two operating systems are based on different programming languages.

“One is objective C [for the IOS] and the other is Java [for the Android], so the implementations are a bit different,” Jerry said. “So it’s kind of hard to make the two apps really similar to each other because they have two different design patterns.”

Jerry also assisted his employer with building its platform client side code (figuring out how to make the application work).

With the advancements in the technological world, Jerry’s designing is not solely restricted to the smartphone. In fact, he has taken a rain check on the Android to finish up other assignments.

“It does look like an interesting platform and I’ll look into it more as the platform progresses, but right now, I have other plans,” Jerry said. “I’m working on a couple websites for different clubs.”