Husky Bus app revamped for new year

With another semester kicking into gear, students will be thanking the recently updated Husky Bus app to find the easiest and quickest routes to their respective classes.

The popular app among students, available in Apple’s app store, was created by Evan Kimia a year ago. His goal was to help students figure out which bus route to take and which bus is coming the soonest by using a bus map designed by Kimia based off of the UConn Campus Map.

Kimia, a Computer Science major in the last semester of his senior year, said the recent update contains a number of improvements.

“The new version was updated to provide a real-time mini map of your bus so you can actually see where it is, said Kimia. Instead of seeing every bus moving it will only show you the one closest to you, making the screen less cluttered. It also shows if the bus is currently stopped and what direction it’s going in, along with your current position if it’s getting close to you.”

The update also gives Kimia the power to modify a stop instantly. If transportation informs him of any changes, it would take five minutes to alter instead of waiting one week, since Apple manually approves each update.

Kimia, a native of Manhattan, said that he set out to do two things when developing the app.

“Help me figure out what route to take because transportation only provided individual maps for each route and not one universal bus map like they have in the New York City subway system and to tell me when the bus is coming,” Kimia.

The Husky Bus app, originally designed for Android devices, had to be discontinued in order for it to be compatible with Apple’s iOS format for the iPhone.

Kimia programmed and designed all versions of the Husky Bus app himself and as a result, Apple awarded him a scholarship to attend their annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco this past summer. WWDC is a weeklong Apple School where Apple engineers teach new technologies, and introduce new Apple products.