CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Readers of The Daily Barometer, Oregon State University's campus paper, learned an interesting fact Wednesday about one of OSU's undergraduates, a student who transferred to the university just this fall: He recently designed an iPhone application.
In and of itself, that might not be such a big deal, given that so many students these days are learning how to create apps for the Apple mobile phone, other smart phones and tablets. But this is an app you've no doubt heard of and probably seen in the weeks following the untimely death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs -- the iPhone candle.
Described formally in the Apple App Store as the "Free Candle by Poets Mobile," the application is the work of Marty Ulrich, 22, who created it while working for the Los Angeles design firm, Poets Road, according to the Barometer. Ulrich was a student at the time at Cuesta College, where he took a course in iPhone programming. He actually created the app for a Poets Road client, Visicandle, which makes artificial LED candles. The Barometer reports what came next:
View full sizeThe "Free Candle" app designed by OSU student Marty Ulrich is an international success.Indeed, because so many mourners used the Free Candle app to pay homage to Jobs, it became
. It has now been downloaded more than 800,000 times.
Ulrich is illustrative of several trends at OSU. As a transfer student, he's one of many men and women who began their academic careers at community colleges before moving to OSU, which is the only Oregon institution with dual enrollment agreements with every community college in the state, as well as several more in other states.
Second, like Ulrich, OSU students are active in design of applications for smart phones. An OSU student team, in fact, helped to create the university's current mobile phone app (available free at
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id476636223?mt=8).
Lastly, though Ulrich is originally from Oregon, he is among a growing number of California students choosing OSU -- somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 of those students are enrolled this year, many of them drawn by the strengths of the university's College of Engineering, where Ulrich is a computer science major. Five graduates of the college hold CEO positions at major Silicon Valley firms, and well-known businesses such as Intel, HP and Portland General Electric regularly hire significant numbers of OSU engineering graduates.
Read more about Ulrich and the app he created via
.