Snow Day? There's an App for That!

While enduring a hot, muggy Ohio summer, University of Cincinnati engineering freshman Scott Fink, along with a high school classmate who is now a student at William and Mary College, decided to plan ahead to colder times, fun in the snow and no school.

Capitalizing on their technical prowess and the ever fluctuating weather in the tri-state, Fink and his partner created the ultimate application for winter - a snow app to predict whether classes will be canceled by winter weather. 

After all, what more do students want than to know they could potentially have a snow day? Said Fink, “The Snow Day Calculator popped into my head, and we started writing the algorithm and developing graphics.

The biggest challenges, according to Fink, was learning Java, XML and Objective-C formats for development of the app.

The app predicts whether classes will be canceled by winter weather by combining snowfall predictions with other factors to give users a percentage-based prediction of whether they will have class or not. “We waited until December to release the app because we wanted it to be well timed,” said Fink.

And well timed it was. The app, which costs 99 cents and is available on iPhone and Android devices, has downloaded in waves based on storms. Stated Fink, "… with this past storm, we surged up over 200 downloads in about a month.We were as high as 26th in the Apple App Store weather rankings on January 3.”  

The team faced competition for the app idea right off the bat. UC's Fink explained, “Someone copied our idea about a week after us and came out with a similar app for $1.99. So, we have had to effectively market the app and prove that ours is just as good or better for less money. It has been extremely rewarding to see some real results from our hard work. It's important to translate learning into real world experience.”

Aside from creating mobile applications, Fink and his partner, Matt Sniff, are making opportunities for themselves on the Internet. “Matt and I are kind of taking things into our own hands,” said Fink. “We have already made a website called photorankr.com.  It’s a place for amateur photographers to have their work shared and rated, and it uses an algorithm to rank which ones are 'trending' the most at any given moment.”

In addition, Sniff has released collegecambio.com at William and Mary, and Fink hopes to expand it to UC soon. This is a website where “students can not only buy and sell textbooks, but they can buy and sell just about anything else, talk about professors and classes, arrange rides home, or anything else they could possibly need,” said Fink.