While working for UCSD IT services, I met someone who needed help rewriting an app that he made for room scheduling. I was quite interested and spent most of my time at ITS working on this project.

This is a frame of one of the actual hosted carousel pages.

He had many pages like this that were created by a local designer and hosted through Carousel. These pages displayed any information and were hosted on a separate server to ensure the devices just needed to display the page.

Originally the app was a fork of the Zoom apk, written on objective C, it was massive with thousands of lines of code just for one app that needs basic functionality.

So, to start this project I started teaching myself Swift and messing around in the Swift playground trying to make things like calculators and such. Then I slowly started implementing the features that he had asked for.

For a couple weeks I was adding features and researching iOS security. I eventually got the app to work and I designed it so that any number of pages can be added whenever needed, I also made it easy to swap between pages for deployment on many iPads.

For security, I was able to turn off screen functionality so users couldn’t break in to the iPad or get to anything unwanted.

This was a shorter project and I was done with around 300 lines of code compared to the few thousand it was before.

This app is still being used across the UCSD campus today on over 60 iPads in many of the buildings, if you see it go play around with it, see if you can break my code!