Two months ago, alumnus Alex Reid was at a bar with friends, trying to request a song from the disc jockey and struggling to be heard over the loud music.
"Then we thought it'd be really cool if there was an app where you could request a song and communicate with the DJ from your phone," Reid said. "After we said that there was sort of just a light bulb, and we thought we'd try to make one."
Now Reid and four friends are preparing to introduce queUP, an app that lets users send DJs song requests from their cell phones.
Now available free on the iTunes store, queUP is being introduced by way of a launch party beginning at 10 p.m. Friday at the Silo bar in Muncie.
"The DJ will be using it," Reid said. "And anybody who downloads the app and can show it on their phone will get their cover charge waived."
Senior Brayden Wilmoth said he and queUP's other creators, a total of three Ball State students and two alumni, began laying out plans for the app one night over Monday night football. They've been using their own money to fund the $20 monthly server charges.
Reid called queUP a "passion project" and Wilmoth said he and the other creators devoted a good amount of their spare time to creating the app and finishing it quickly. They designed it using Apple's Xcode application and are still finalizing a mobile web-based version for Android users.
Wilmoth, a computer science major who said he's worked on several apps in the past and wants to be a mobile application designer after graduation, said it's difficult to describe the technical process of creating an app such as queUP.
"It's all done in an Objective-C programming language," Wilmoth said. "There's a lot of back-end stuff that people don't see, like how it scans the location."
The app assesses its user's location and searches a 25-mile radius to see if any nearby bars or other venues have DJs using the app. It then allows users to search for and request songs. Because the app queries the Last.fm database, Wilmoth said users should be able to search for and find practically any song they might want to hear.
Their requests are sent through the app's server to the DJ, who is able to see a list of all songs selected as well as who and how many people requested each, and ideally will use the information to make playlist decisions.
"We just hope it helps engage people at bars, to help them interact with DJs, so they have more power to select the songs that gets played, instead of going up and trying to yell over the loud music and the speakers," Wilmoth said.
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