While Google, Sony and other companies are releasing smartwatches, a UCF engineering couple is releasing apps.
Senior engineering major Tyler Leonhardt and junior engineering major Isabella Moreira released a Starbucks app called Latte, which allows Android users to sign into their Starbuck accounts, add new gift cards or receive rewards when they swipe their smartwatch or phone at a Starbucks location.
“When you choose a default card, you’ll get a barcode on your wear watch that you can scan when you buy coffee at Starbucks to pay for your drink,” Leonhardt said. “That way you don’t have to pull your phone out of your pocket or card out of your wallet.”
Students will able to use the app at the Starbucks on campus.
Moreira said she first considered creating the app with Leonhardt when she worked at Google this past summer.
“I said to Tyler, we love Starbucks and this doesn’t exist yet,” she said. “I want to use this when I go to Starbucks so let’s go make it.”
The couple are Starbucks Gold Level members and Leonhardt himself owns Pebble’s smartwatch. The Apple Watch will be released in 2015 with Google’s Android Wear watch already released this past March. These smartwatches allow users to receive notifications from their phone directly to their watch.
“Developing for Android is one thing,” Moreira said. “Doing it for the wear watch is something completely different that you have to learn how to do.”
And they did. But, they’re not the only UCF students who’ve released an app for Google Play Store. Another UCF student, senior engineering major Steven McConnon, released two.
Screen Attack, one of his two apps, allows users to shoot at a screen using a pistol, paintball or flamethrower. The app has already 30,000 downloads since its launch in 2012. Got Your BAC, an app McConnon released with a group of classmates, estimates the user’s blood alcohol level by tracking the drink intake. It was rereleased this past year.
“We thought it would be a fun app to show people at parties and get a rough estimate of their BAC,” McConnon said. Got Your BAC provides games like walking in a line to test short-term memory, too.
For McConnon, building and submitting these app takes from 1 week to months. For Leonhardt and Moreira, they say they’ve been working on Latte since July but will continue to create more apps together.
