UWAlk – Your University in Your Pocket (/dev/world/2011)
Channel: AUC_ANZ
Date: 14/12/2014

Presenter: Chris McDonald

This presentation discusses and reflects on the design and development of UWAlk, our native iPhone application to assist new students and on-campus visitors to locate buildings, people, and events at The University of Western Australia.  Our project emerged from a coursework assignment at UWA, grew through an Honours and a Masters student projects, and has become a university supported tool.

The goal of our application is to deliver most required information on-the-run, within 30 seconds, which often precludes the acquisition of a WiFi connection.  As our Objective-C development proceeded, our small team focused on two important aspects – the development of a framework to consistently support an “unlimited” number of modules, and the correct representation and location of both the application’s static and dynamic data.

To overcome some limitations of iOS, we have developed our own tiled mapping interface, providing zooming and panning, configurable pins and callouts.  Integral to our mapping is our route-planner, which determines and displays routes between a user’s current location and their next lecture, meeting, or any point on campus, door-to-door, honouring requests for the route to be maximally undercover, well-lit, or wheelchair accessible. Our mapping and route-planner are accessible from any module, such as timetabling and the staff directory.

This presentation will reflect on which iOS features worked well for our project, and which introduced challenges that we had to work around.