Staples Senior Creates Handy iPhone App

"There's an app for that," says the ads.

There is an app for pretty much everything, including Staples High School.            

Two years ago, Staples senior Eric Lubin created an iPhone app, called iSHS. The useful app let students and teachers to view all relevant schedule information. One could customize the app to see their daily schedule, see how much time was left in each period, and also view lunch period they had, which changes based on department and month.

Despite the high level of convenience Lubin had already given the Staples community with iSHS, he spent his summer designing its successor, myStaples. Lubin's inspiration for the updated app came out of his growing disappointment with iSHS, which mounted this past June. 

Once he made the decision to make the upgrade, a determined Lubin worked hard all summer long.

"I could safely say that I spent at least a couple hundred hours on this application throughout the entire summer. Some days I would even work into the early hours of three to five a.m., oblivious to the outside world and in my own little programming bubble," Lubin said.

MyStaples has many advantages over iSHS, the first being that myStaples is a native iPhone application, and iSHS is a web app. The main result of this difference is that myStaples not need wireless Internet to function, while iSHS does.

Other new features include a homework organizer, one-click access links to Blackboard, the school's online communication and organizational resource, and Snapgrades, an online grade book commonly used by Staples teachers. 

The new and improved app also allows students and teachers to view announcements that rotate on the television screens throughout the school.

"No more standing around waiting for the TV's to cycle back to that one announcement you're looking for," Lubin said.

A final feature that sets myStaples apart from iSHS is that myStaples allows users to set reminders based on how much time is left in the period.

"Whether you are in your free [period] and would like to know when there are ten minutes left in the period, if you are a teacher and need to be notified when there are two minutes left, or even if you are a student who always misses the buses and needs to be notified with three minutes left before they leave, myStaples can notify you by sending your device a push notification reminding you that the period is about to end," Lubin explained.

Even though the new features are defining, Lubin is not done with myStaples just yet. He has already submitted two updates with bug fixes, and has a list of ideas that he would like to add in the future "Most notably, a way to view all Inklings News articles directly in the app," he said.

Despite how daunting the task of creating an app might be for the average person, let alone a high school student, Lubin finished his project with ease.

"To be honest, nothing really stands out too much as being most challenging. In retrospect, I am quite surprised at the ease with which I developed this application," he said. "Not once was I unable to implement an idea for the app, and it was almost majestic seeing all of the parts of the application slowly coming together."

With myStaples available for free on itunes, this will be Lubin's third app in the store. The experience of developing myStaples along with his other apps has opened Lubin's eyes to many more possibilities in the world of programming in years to come.

"Throughout this experience, I have realized just how much I enjoy developing iPhone applications. Although I am also very interested in engineering, physics, and mathematics, computer science and programming always remain open as a possible field of study in the future," Lubin said.