Burlingame student releases SMUHSD app

BHS senior Sebastian Shanus recently released an iPhone app that includes a daily planner, a bell schedule, and a browser that accesses the SchoolLoop mobile site.

Originally designed exclusively for BHS students, Shanus’s app recently became available for all students in the district, with full support for all six regular high schools. Currently available in the Apple App Store, the app is supported by most mobile Apple products—from the iPod touch to the iPad—and comes completely free of charge.

The app’s functions are wrapped up in a simple-to-learn, self-explanatory interface that is conveniently accessible on a mobile device. “Students were eagerly waiting for an app that could consolidate all the necessary information in one area,” says Shanus, “And over time, I noticed this trend and decided to make the app just because I like developing applications.”

Shanus has been developing applications since before his freshman year. He recalls, “When I was younger, I was always into computers. The Christmas during seventh grade, I got an iPod touch, and started wondering: ‘How do they create these apps?’ I became curious, Googled a bit, and soon got my first app running—one that displayed ‘Hello World.’”

And he’s been developing ever since. “I released my first app—a fortune cookie app near the end of the 8th grade,” he chuckles. “It was the first fortune-cookie app too—that is, before the big companies started working on their own versions.”

But Shanus is set apart from these big companies in that he is able to create applications almost entirely on his own. While the top corporations often hire entire teams to divide up the work into small workable subprojects, Shanus does everything from the design to the actual coding himself, a very tedious and difficult task.

“Aside from the occasional graphic that I’ll have my artistic friend design, I do most of the designing and make most of the [user interface] myself.” However, he explains that he is not entirely on his own: “A really big help is actually Apple’s own IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, which comes with a lot of nice pre-existing designs since they’re the type of company that wants all their products and apps to look and feel really nice.”

Shanus, who plans on attending college next year, explained, “I’m thinking about majoring in computer science and economics. However, I’m also thinking about eventually getting an MBA, since I’m really captivated by the business angle of all of this. It’s good since already having a computer science background really helps with working in the tech industry.”

The future looks promising for Shanus and other individuals like him, with the smartphone market estimated to be worth over 150 billion dollars by 2014. Needless to say, it is their efforts that will bring us the next Temple Run or Angry Birds. The future of the mobile industry is theirs to shape.