McMaster students storm campus with new SMS weather service

McMaster students are now able to receive real-time updates on local weather and upcoming bus arrival times, thanks to a new service called MacSMS. Designed and developed by three McMaster students, the service has the potential to become ubiquitous throughout the greater McMaster community.

By simply texting (289) 724-1622 a variety of commands that include weather, temperature, and bus stop numbers, users can instantly receive free updates on local weather and HSR bus arrivals.

“We just wanted a faster way to find out what the weather is like, and keep in touch with any alerts that are going on in the McMaster area,” said Shubham Gupta, one of the co-founders of MacSMS, along with Gurbir Dhulla and Taranveer Virk.

Gurbir also added that, “If [students] don’t have access to Internet, or Wi-Fi, or data, for any reason, they should still be able to get those updates whenever they want to request it.”

The free service utilizes information from the McMaster University Weather Station in order to provide the most recent data from within 15 minutes, specific to the area. The service also cuts out the hassle of calling the HSR phone line for updated bus arrivals, Taranveer explained.

“Essentially, students don’t have to use their minutes or anything when they’re trying to get bus information… it’s all about making student life easier,” said Taranveer.

The three co-founders are currently in their third year at McMaster and are all pursuing a degree in software engineering. However, they emphasized that they’ve learned a lot of development on their own and in their spare time over the years, and that the project itself required additional research.

“The biggest thing we learned in school is teamwork, just working with people,” said Shubham.

The three have been programming for the better part of seven years.

In addition to the service, all three had a hand in developing their website, macsms.me, which boasts a professional quality and where users can register to receive automated updates each day.

When speaking about each of their roles, Gurbir discussed how his job was focused on managing the back-end of the service, developing the infrastructure and setting up servers, which he acknowledged was fairly difficult.

As of March 10, the project is officially one month old. Despite the lack of any formal advertising or marketing, they’ve already received a lot of positive feedback on the service.

Said Shubham, “That’s something we did not expect… we’ve had a huge amount of interest, and people are constantly e-mailing us and thanking us.”

When discussing their future plans, they emphasized that one of the key features of MacSMS is that students only need text messaging to utilize the service. In a future update, Taranveer described how users will be able to customize different alert times for weather each day.

“[The update] should be rolled out soon, and a lot of other great features are still to come,” he said.

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