All you really want (tell me what you want, what you really really want) is some macaroni and cheese. You pull out your phone to check what the dining centers have, but when you bring up the Bison Dining app it’s roughly as responsive as a dead weasel. You have a minor meltdown.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had that experience more frequently than I’d care to admit.
Thankfully, someone with a stronger work ethic and better grasp of technology than me also had issues with the Bison Dining app.
“On some days, the formatting would be off, and the user interface was just bad in general,” Tyler Gaffaney said, a sophomore majoring in computer science. “Frankly, NDSU deserved better.”
Gaffaney independently developed a revamped dining app called ND Dining that improved on some of the shortcomings of the Bison Dining app.
Gaffaney built a program that uses a technique called web scraping to gather data on what is being served.
“It’s legal since it’s pulling from sites that are publicly available,” Gaffaney said with a laugh. “I wasn’t sure what I could build when I started out, but I think all of the bases are covered as far as legality is concerned.”
Legality was also the reason Gaffaney named the app ND Dining, since he wanted to avoid infringing on any rights and naming issues.
The ND Dining app displays menus for all of the dining centers up to a week in advance, and it even displays badges next to gluten free options.
“Also, it lets you choose your favorite items, and then you can push a button to see if any of your favorites are being served on a certain day,” Gaffaney said.
The app went live Aug. 26 and is currently available only for Apple users, but Gaffaney hopes to have an Android version operational by winter.
“Even so, we have about 1,500 total downloads, and we just passed 1,000 daily users,” Gaffaney noted.
The best reason to try out the ND Dining app?
“This one actually works,” Gaffaney said.
I personally tried out the app. Take it from me, it’s 99 percent better than a dead weasel.