For all of your printing needs

Have you ever sent a document to the printer, taken the trek downstairs to print it out, only to discover the print job didn’t go through? Well, computer science major Jervis Muindi (SEAS ’13) has a solution for you: CU Print. This app for the Android platform (sorry, iOS users) is available free of charge via the Android store, and for the technically inclined the source code is published on Github. Bwog sat down with Jervis to find out his motivation for the app and get some details on how it works.

Bwog: So what led you to develop the app in the first place?

Jervis: Mostly it was for my own personal use. One night I was going to an event with some friends, and I needed to print out the tickets. I sent the file to a NINJa printer from my computer, but when I got to the printer the job hadn’t gone through. I really had to get going, so I used my phone to send the file from my email via Print@CU. The experience of using Print@CU from a phone wasn’t exactly streamlined, but it worked. Afterwards, I thought it would be useful to have an app that cleaned up the experience of printing from a mobile device, and so CU Print was born.

Bwog: What do you see as the average use-case for CU Print?

Jervis: Well, certainly the same kind of situation I found myself in with the tickets, but more generally I try to live in the cloud (I keep most of my files in DropBox), so it really makes living off of my phone more feasible. The app will be particularly useful if you keep your files in some sort of cloud storage, be it Google Drive or DropBox, or even if you just keep files stored on your phone.

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So many apps, so little time!

At one time, students arrived at Columbia with nothing in their backpacks but textbooks, notebooks, and a Macbook Pro. Such halcyon days are long gone now, and we’re sure that many members of the Class of 2015 have iPhones and Droids. Bwog’s own app aficionado Peter Sterne identifies the perfect app for…

Navigating the City

Hopstop (iPhone/Android) is the gold standard of subway and bus directions. Google Maps will work in a pinch, but Hopstop will get you from A to Brooklyn the best way possible—whether you want the cheapest route, the fastest route, or the route that involves the most walking. If you want to cut down on walking, make sure to check out Exit Strategy ($3.99, iPhone), an app developed by Columbia alums that tells you where to stand on the subway platform so you’re right in front of the door that will open right in front of the stairs at your destination. The developers didn’t get that info from the MTA; they had to figure it out through trial and error.

Speaking of the MTA, they like to randomly shut down and reroute subways on the weekends. iTrans ($3.99, iPhone) includes the latest service changes, but you can also just view them for free by bookmarking the MTA’s mobile website.

Banking

Remember the time you went out to dinner and couldn’t afford the bill because you didn’t have enough money on your debit card? You could constantly go to the ATM every time you go out, but it’s much easier to download an app from your bank to check your balance on the go. Citibank (iPhone/Android), Chase (iPhone/Android), and Bank of America (iPhone/Android) all offer mobile apps. These apps can also find nearby ATMs and even let you make payments from your phone.
(Note: The only way to get the Citibank Android app is to go to citi.com/mobileapp on your Droid)

Finding New Music

Frats usually play whatever’s most popular on iTunes, but at least once over the next four years, you’ll find yourself at a party with no idea what song is playing. That’s where Shazam Encore ($5.99, iPhone/Android) comes in. Just turn it on, hold out your phone, and in a minute, the song and artist will be identified for you. It’s like magic!

Soundhound ∞ ($6.99, iPhone/Android) is similar, but identifies songs more quickly and less accurately. If you want to try before you buy, download the free trial versions of Shazam (iPhone/Android) and Soundhound (iPhone/Android). And on those rare nights you’re not invited to parties, you can discover new music on your own by creating custom radio stations on Pandora (iPhone/Android).

After the jump, apps for finding a place to eat, stargazing, wasting time, and more!

Welcome back to SocketHop, where Bwog locks the few engineers on staff into a room and makes them explain things. We’ve covered tools to help you be more productive and new operating systems for your computer before, and today we take a look at a new Columbia app for your Android smartphone.

That’s right, our very own mobile app. Ariq Azad, CC ’14, working alongside Andrew Freiman, Cornell ’14, has released an unofficial Columbia University Android app, because hey, why not. (Come at us, Princeton.) So far the app’s user interface and features are a little humble, and Azad himself notes that this is just a “proof of concept.” Nevertheless, with the app, users can search for and read reviews on CULPA, read the latest campus news (stories from Bwog, the official CU news stream, and Spec), look at what amounts to be the campus on Google Maps, and search the Bulletin for classes. While no one would prefer doing any of these things on a mobile device, we can perhaps see some use in the Bulletin feature—the search results list times and locations for courses, and in case you’re darting between classes and you forget where the next one is, figuring this out via the app is much simpler than logging into CourseWorks or SSOL.

The app itself was created with PhoneGap, a development platform that allows developers to use web technologies to write an app once and deliver the product to multiple platforms. This means the interface won’t necessarily have the look and feel of an app that’s designed for a particular phone, since it’s targeting multiple devices. However, it also means there’s a greater potential to see this unofficial app come to iOS or BlackBerry devices since it’s such a simple porting process. Indeed, Azad tells Bwog that the process of iOS development will start soon after classes begin.

There’s a healthy list of upcoming features for the app too (although if you’re savvy with the technology industry, you know that promises are often not kept), and Azad told us to look for these on the Android app before the iOS release. Potentially coming soon are SSOL info, MTA data integration, and CourseWorks push notifications. Push notifications are the kind of alerts a phone gives the instant it receives a new text or email. Now imagine a world where every time a grade gets posted on CouresWorks or a new assignment is posted, your phone buzzes. That gets our circuits flowing.

We know there’s a large body of programming talent out there. If you know of any other CU apps, tell us about them at tips@bwog.com.