Following the lead of last year's Dining at Dartmouth app, which developer Matt Harding '13 said was downloaded about 2,000 times, The Ropes will allow students to monitor their DBA, meal swipes, the hours when they purchase food and which dining halls they frequent.
While she does not have a specific deadline for The Ropes' release, Javitt said she expects to make the app available to the public by the end of fall term. The app is currently undergoing beta testing, she said.
"My goal is just to make life better for my friends," Javitt said. "I go to a school with 4,000 kids, and I don't know all of them obviously, but we all have the same interests we just want to eat good food and be healthy and happy."
Javitt designed The Ropes but hired one professional developer to code part of the app and relied on another to incorporate the online nutrition info for DDS' menus.
The app will be free in Apple's iTunes App Store and will require users to log in with a Dartmouth account if they wish to rate food. Javitt eventually plans to monetize the app to repay an investor, but does not expect to charge for the app to do so.
Eventually, Javitt hopes to incorporate push notifications into The Ropes, alerting a user if a favorite food will be served that day, she said. She also plans to expand the app to allow students to rate study spaces.
"The vision is like to be a guide like kind of like a concierge for college students, especially freshmen," she said. "Do you remember trying to find a spot in the library freshman fall? It's hard."
Javitt may expand the app to other campuses in the future, depending on how easily she can work with the information available about their meal plans, she said.
Beyond helping guide students toward the most popular food options offered each day, Javitt hopes to share the data gathered by the app with DDS to improve food selection. DDS indicated potential willingness to consider the data, Javitt said.
Students with dietary restrictions can use the application to filter menus to show only foods they are able to eat. Ultimately, Javitt hopes the data that The Ropes accumulates will allow DDS to assess whether its menus are appetizing to students with limited diets, she said.
"If pizza is always being rated really highly, and all the gluten-free foods are not being rated highly, either the users are just biased against gluten-free foods or we actually need better options," she said.
The Ropes is not the first app designed with the intention of improving the College's dining experience. Last spring's Dining at Dartmouth app synced with students' dining accounts, providing real-time information on their meal plans. That app suffered from stability problems, leaving some users without full functionality. Javitt said her team has resolved these issues, so The Ropes should work for all students who can log in with their dining account.
Harding emphasized that he fully supported Javitt's attempt to enhance the dining experience for Dartmouth students.
He did raise a concern about privacy, noting that developers must balance the "immersive" nature of mobile applications with their potential to become "intrusive." Javitt said that personal information may be stored but will remain private and secure.
Gabe Boning, a 19-year-old software developer who met Javitt through a mutual friend, was responsible for incorporating nutrition information into the app. Boning credited Javitt with designing the app and said his work developing the Application Programming Interface was not particularly challenging.
Javitt said she was inspired to develop the app in an engineering class and completed most of the design this summer.
The Ropes will be released through Square Knot Industries, a company Javitt founded this summer.
