The new UNC mobile site has made huge progress in the last month. Live now at m.unc.edu, the site works with iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and many other phones. We have added a growing list of news items and event feeds, links to the UNC YouTube channel (and initial plans to make that look nicer), and for iPod / iPhone users a link to the UNC iTunes U presence that drops you right into the store if you are running the 3.0 OS. The campus directory app is quite popular and I’ve used it myself many times when I was walking to a meeting and needed to call someone who wasn’t in my address book. All in all I am really pleased with the progress and really thankful to the MIT Mobile team for releasing the code.
Goals for go-live in the Fall include a campus map and a library catalog search. Both are tough to implement and may get postponed past an official launch, but we’re working on them. We are also planning a Family Weekend addition so that folks attending that event in October will have schedules and other information available to them on their mobile devices. We should have that out in the September time frame.
Reaction from campus has been really positive. Everyone who sees this likes it and many folks have contributed content or want to. There’s even a link to it on the main UNC home page if you visit there from a mobile device. Could it be that after 3+ years of plugging away on this I finally have a foothold established in the mobile world for UNC Chapel Hill?