As Wichita State students absentmindedly tap away on their smartphones instead of listening in class, it’s likely that many of them have no idea what goes into developing the applications they use every day.

However, four WSU students learned the hard way just how taxing this process can be.

When Dominic Greene, Alex Truong, Eric Corey and Austin Crane sat down back in May to develop Shuttle Tracker — an app that uses GPS to display where the campus shuttle buses are at any given time — they thought it could be done by the start of the fall semester. However, the app did not release until mid-October.

Truong, whose role on the project involved working with satellite data, said a large part of the delay was the insufficient performance of the Google Maps framework they were using at the start of development.

“A lot of hours came from this framework we used that we trashed, because it wasn’t fast enough,” Truong said.

The team, most of which had no experience developing apps, logged more than 1,400 hours of development time. Greene, who focused on the visual design of the app, said designing the art for the Android version was a pain, because the platform is across various devices with many different screen resolutions.

“You have to make every piece of art six times. It’s ridiculous,” Greene said. “Apple is so much easier — I just had to make two.”

Corey’s job was to make the app work on Android devices, which he said was a valuable learning experience.

“I learned a lot of what you don’t want to do when developing an Android application,” Corey said. “There are things I’ve learned now that, if I could go back and do the whole app in a day, I would do some things differently.”

Crane, on the other hand, made the iOS version of Shuttle Tracker, and he is not as sure about their ability to do it in a day now.

“If it started now, it would take a week,” Crane said.

Greene was even less optimistic than that.

“I would at least give us a month,” Greene said.

However, each member of the team maintained that the prolonged development process was important in learning how to work as a team and, occasionally, step up and lead.

“It really started to show how well you can work with a team,” Greene said. “It was each of us taking a lead at some point.”

Crane is generally credited with coming up with the idea for Shuttle Tracker, but he was adamant about the role the whole team played in its development.

“It wouldn’t have happened without these three,” Crane said. “I want to make that publicly clear.”