A team of University of Pennsylvania undergraduates worked through winter break to code a state-of-the-art mobile news app
With nearly two-thirds of users arriving at TheDP.com via mobile devices, there was a clear need for a smart phone app.
Developing such a sophisticated and expensive product was a daunting task for the University of Pennsylvania’s independent, non-profit, student newspaper, however, and that’s where Peter Chen stepped up. A junior studying Networked and Social Systems Engineering, Chen put together a team of students with computer, editorial, and design skills. His dedicated squad — they dubbed themselves Operation Canada Goose — spent much of winter break working with their noses to their keyboards.
The result is the newly launched DP+, a mobile app that will deliver The Daily Pennsylvanian — as well as 34th Street and Under The Button — to smart phones everywhere.
“The app is giving users a more streamlined experience than what they would have in a browser. It’s nicer to read and easier to manage content,” Justin Lieb, a junior Computer Science major from Camarillo, Calif. “We can see a significant number of the student population downloading it.”
The teams would consider several hundred downloads a success. Eventually, the team hopes as many as 3,000 users will download the app, which is available in iOS and Android versions. The app adds to the platforms The DP is using to deliver campus news, from a print publication to a website to email newsletters to social media. Hiring out the project would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, but the app was an entirely volunteer effort.
Chen and his team spent fall semester planning and designing the app with the help of The DP’s design desk and content editors who helped them understand what readers would want. Some of the toughest issues for the coders was the design work and finding a font with a copyright license that didn’t cost thousands of dollars but still fit the news aesthetic. Even things as simple as creating a search bar to sort through the content proved a challenge.
“Since we were a small team it allowed us all to see a lot of different aspects of the development process,” said team member Elizabeth Powell, a junior Computer Science major from Marlton, NJ. “Absolute hell. We went through 50 versions and eventually came back to the simplest, first version.”
The real techie work happened over December and January as Operation Canada Goose — the name comes from the task of migrating content from the website, as well as a sly nod to the expensive parkas prevalent on Penn’s campus — hunkered down in front of laptops. The app ended up at 40,000 lines of code and required 368 commits, or major edits, in GitHub.
“The TLDR version: It was a lot of work,” Lieb said with a laugh.
The fourth team member, Raunaq Singh, a freshman Computer Science major from Newtown Square, Penn., met other team members through their work with Penn Labs, a university sponsored development lab.
“A ton of people made contributions. A big thing was like the designers, They took a load off of us. The business side handles the legal stuff, like user agreements. Content people understand how people read content,” Singh said.
Chen, who grew up hanging out at his parents computer shop in Hong Kong and was fascinated by taking apart computers, often to his parents chagrin, said that the kind of experiential learning the team got from developing the app start to finish was something that can’t be replicated in a classroom or even an internship.
Lieb seconded the idea: “I kept thinking, do I have the time for something like this, but then you look at the contribution you could make on campus and the lasting impact you could have on students. Then you know, it’s worth it.”
NEWS RELEASE
Feb. 19, 2021
Contact: Deborah Howlett | howlett@thedp.com | (215) 422-4640