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BCIS Notification App Finally Finished!

Jerry Shan
Jul 29, 2016
2 min read

After a year of learning, software development and debugging, I finally finished building the second generation my school's notification app. For those who haven't check my earlier posts, I created this program so that students and faculty members at my school can get up-to-date information on the events, news, and announcements both in and out of school with their computers.

This is a problem I discovered back in August 2015, when I saw students too lazy to check their emails, or the "Student Bulletin", which, as its name suggests, is supposedly an online platform that informs viewers about what's going on in school. The web design layout was outdated (or retro), the font, and the huge amount of information pasted into the webpage makes it unlikely for an average visitor to have enough time to read through all that mess. Seeing that the school wasn't gonna take any action to fix their website, I decided to start a new way of notifying students on important announcements and school-related events that are important for them to know.

Throughout grade 10, I talked to Mr. Lambert, our secondary school principle, Mr. Thong, the head of the IT department at BCIS, and Mr. Longrigg at the marketing department. From these conversations, their perspectives are clear: The idea is great, but the product needs further development and optimization. I could have easily gave up, but I didn't. Instead, I researched more on how to make the user interface more comfortable to use and more professional in general. My second version, as you can see, has a lot of new features that weren't included in the old version (I apologize for not having any screenshots of that):

This is the new popover window, which allows the user to customize the font, font size, delete the current message, or jump to an earlier message by date:

The history window also looks better:

The app also supports a dark theme, which I personally think is pretty cool:

Meanwhile, the app also supports plenty of other color themes, so that users can find the color they like best. (The subtitle below is red because it's an urgent message, not because

of the theme color)