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Students launch new sports app

iPhone screenshots of "The Vike". “The Vike is intended for Palo Alto High School students who want to go and see their friends play,” junior Brian Tracy said. Screenshots by Daniel Li.
Featured above are iPhone screenshots of “The Vike”, a new sports app created by junior Brian Tracy and senior Matthew Seligson. Screenshot by Daniel Li.

Two Palo Alto High School students are actively publicizing a new iPhone app For Paly sports, “The Vike,” after launching the service earlier this month.

Junior Brian Tracy and senior Matthew Seligson created “The Vike” to give students quick and easy access to Paly’s varsity sports team’s schedules.

The app was originally designed to track the availability of Paly sports facilities, but later turned into a scheduling app for all Paly sports, according to Tracy.

“In the past, whenever Matthew and I wanted to go to Paly to practice lacrosse or soccer, we ran the risk of showing up and having a team playing on the same field we wanted to use,” Tracy said. “Originally, the only purpose of the app was to tell if a certain field was being used, saving people the effort of getting all the way to Paly only to realize they have to go home. From there, it spun off into a more comprehensive scheduling app not just for the fields, but for every sport.”

According to Tracy, “The Vike” started off as a project for their Advanced Placement Computer Science class last year.

“We [Tracy and Seligson] decided to develop the app continuously through the rest of the year and into the summer,” Tracy said. “We finally finished it off early this school year.”

Tracy said that he and Seligson faced many challenges throughout the development process.

“The programming itself is quite difficult, but that is another issue,” Tracy said. “A big challenge was finding a reliable resource that we could pull data from to deliver the kind of information you see in the app.”

Tracy encourages users to check out other features in the app.

“My personal two favorite features of the app are the slideshow of all the sports and the ‘Take Me Here’ feature,” Tracy said. “The slideshow acts as an alternative to the boring list of sports to choose from. To actually see students play each sport is a nice way to display the necessary information. Secondly, the ‘Take Me Here’ feature is for people who want to go to any away games. ‘The Vike’ makes it really easy to get directions to all of our away games by integrating with Apple Maps.”

Currently, “The Vike” is only available on iOS devices.

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