Say what you will about the selfie trend: The sometimes-flattering, sometimes-funny self-portraits photographed at arm’s length or in a mirror and then posted onto social media sites allow their subject-photographers to call all the shots.
So, when then-freshman Will Jamieson couldn’t get a good shot of himself in a dim room because his phone’s flash was on the back of his camera, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
“At that moment, I decided I was going to make an app that emulated a flash with the front camera,” says the computer science major, who went about developing the Front Flash Android app. “The College’s computer science department really gave me the tools I needed to build this app. It was the Data Structures course that helped advance my critical thinking and bug tracking, which was a major task in the development of the app.”
Front Flash launched last June and was immediately picked up by app-review blogs that liked the idea – prompting hundreds of thousands of downloads and encouraging Jamieson to create a company, Supreme Apps, so that he can continue releasing the apps he develops.
And, of course, continue calling all the shots.
