The Challenge

Every two years, Downing College holds a May Ball, a big event with food, drink and revelry which takes place in…June. Every attendee is given a paper programme for the event, but that’s no fun.

As webmaster for the ball, the task was to create a mobile app which allows attendees to find their way around the ball, as well as receive push notifications during the evening.

The Problem

The app’s content needed to be easily updatable, so should be stored in a cloud database. Access to the app needed to be time-limited; we could only release details of the programme a few hours before the event.

I had no previous app development experience, and unfortunately little time spare to invest in learning Swift; hence it was to be a job for a JS framework. More specifically Ionic, which pleasingly uses Microsoft’s type-checked flavour TypeScript.