By ERIC OBERMAN
Cornell students looking to plan their future schedules will have the option to use a new mobile application to organize their courseload.
CUAgenda, which launched last month, is a free app created by Dennis Fedorko ’17 for Cornell students that acts as a mobile alternative to online services such as Schedulizer and Chequerd.
The app — which became available for download on iTunes Aug. 17 — allows students to scroll through courses and add them to their schedules. Schedules can be viewed on a weekly or daily basis and students can add other appointments or events to their daily schedules, according to Fedorko, who is also a designer for The Sun.
“Cornell students can basically do anything that they could in Schedulizer or Chequerd, but on their phones and with greater reliability,” he said.
This reliability, according to Fedorko, comes from the fact that CUAgenda operates offline and therefore cannot crash due to high traffic.
“Every other app crashes,” he said. “The day before course enroll, I would be sitting in front of my computer, and make sure everything is good and all of the scheduling websites would be down.”
The app comes with all of the course information for the next semester upon being downloaded, so there are no delays, Fedorko added.
Approximately 2,000 students have downloaded the app, which has a five star rating on iTunes, according to Fedorko. While CUAgenda is currently only available for iOS, he said an Android version is in the works.
Fedorko added he decided to create the app — despite having no prior iPhone coding experience — because he wanted to apply the skills he was learning as a computer science major to make something that students could use.
“I knew absolutely zero coding for iOS,” he said. “So, I taught myself how to do all of that.”
While there are advertisements on the free app, users can pay $1.99 for an ad-free version. Fedorko said income from the app goes toward improving its functionality and that he is not seeking a profit from CUAgenda.
“I’m not really profiting off of it — I just want people to use it and enjoy it,” he said.
Terrill Jones ’17 , a CUAgenda user, said the “best part” of the app is its accessibility.
“Early in the semester when in still trying to figure out my schedule and where to go for class, it’s handy to be able to pull out my phone to see my next class without having to pull out a printed schedule,” Jones said.
Paul DeLucia ’17 also said he uses the app due to its convenience in helping locate classes.
“I found the app to be especially useful on the first day of classes when I had to locate the room number of one of my classes,” he said.
While Fedorko said that there are no plans yet to expand CUAgenda to other colleges, Nathan Lauderback ’17, who transferred to Cornell, said he believes this system would have been helpful at his last college.
“I am a transfer student and the previous institution I attended had nothing like CUAgenda,” Lauderback said. “…you had to search the web looking for scheduler websites that had the information that CUAgenda has.”