College freshman Robert Cash recently released GroupCal, an app that allows for the creation of synced group schedules. | Stephen Fowler, Student Life Editor

Photo by Stephen Fowler

Technology obsessed software developer and College freshman Robert Cash recently developed and released an app called GroupCal, which offers scheduling for friends, group partners, study groups and any other group of people who are interested in coordinating schedules.

“This app helps connect people and makes life — well — much easier,” Cash said.

With technology taking over our lives in a drastic manner, talented people like Cash are finding new ways to connect everyone in a much faster and more efficient way.

GroupCal works by creating a group where you and your friends can add your schedules into a list, which allows everyone in the group to see all of the schedule.

“There is also an interesting feature called the Now Events in which one can send an invite to the whole group on a particular day to do something and it has an RSVP function. It gives you feedback and makes the invitation public, to see who all can and can’t attend. You can add and remove people from the group eliminating all of their synced calendars,” Cash said.

The newest features Cash plans to add include creating a personal schedule for and syncing it to any group that you join, but it has a privacy filter to it.

“It’s a lot like GroupMe. I also want to add a notification system incase you miss any notifications.” Cash said. “Further, you could also send out schedule requests in a ‘private message’ kind of format,” Cash said.

He went on to note that by the “second week of college, everyone was using GroupMe.”

Cash, intrigued by the struggles of other freshmen trying to coordinate their schedules, was inspired to act.

“Some people on my floor and [my] roommate were trying to find out how to coordinate the schedules of all these new people they had met and my roommate suggested I come up with something that would help,” Cash said.

HackATL was the first opportunity Cash had to create a preliminary version of GroupCal. Operating as a one-man army, Cash worked on the entire app himself, including the graphic features and layout of the app.

“The look is all default. I manipulate it to look a certain way with a layout. [The] last week of winter break, I gave it to a few close friends who then helped me figure out a few bugs that are now stabilized. Although since it was the first time I did something like this and it took the collaboration of multiple users, I wanted a couple of users to test it out to figure out what I was missing,” Cash said.

“The new update has some really exciting features coming soon, check this new app out and turn up.” – Robert Cash

After lots of coffee and prolonged hours of programming, Cash claims to have completed the IOS version of this app in a span of three days while at home on break. The Android version of the app took over a week to complete. Cash has over 53 hits so far without mass promotion.

With such great work, come great hardships.

“I had to predict what people would do to make it go wrong, which is really hard. I remember spending days on figuring out how to search and add someone instead of the whole ‘Add Back’ (‘Follow Back’ feature for all Instagram followers) feature,” Cash said.

Cash worked hard to make the app easy to use and easily accessible. “You know how to use it, maybe other people don’t. Further, I didn’t want to seclude certain Android users, so picking up on programming and developing an Android app was hard because I had never done it before and it took way longer than it did for IOS,” Cash said.

Cash also recently came up with another app called “The Party Line” with College freshman Jared Felton-Grice. While this app is only available on IOS, Cash said that it catches all the local parties close to you.

“The new update has some really exciting features coming soon,” Cash said. “Check this new app out and turn up.​”

— By Ksheerja Batra, Contributing Writer

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