New app optimises your Tour de Friday Bar
Do you love drinking beer at AU's Friday bars, but hate keeping track of which bars are open? Or do you want help planning the perfect route? AU students have developed Krawl, an app designed to do exactly that.
It's Friday. The last lecture is over, and you can almost taste that first beer. You gather your friends and head to one of Aarhus University’s many Friday bars. But where are you going? What's open? Is there a Shrek-theme somewhere? And who will keep track of Kaspar when he disappears again?
The app Krawl can help with all of that, explain creators Mikkel Østergaard and Kristian Hedegaard.
I could easily build that in a week
Krawl is a non-profit, student-run association at Computer Science, created by Kristian Hedegaard, Kasper Tonsgaard and Mikkel Østergaard. The app currently features 19 bars and will soon reach 1,200 downloads.
"I got the idea for the app because it didn't exist. I wanted to know where the Friday bars were and when they were open, and then I thought, ‘I could easily build that in a week’,” says Mikkel Østergaard, explaining the idea behind Krawl.
It did take a little longer than a week, but with Kristian Hedegaard and Kasper Tonsgaard on board, Krawl was launched at the end of August.
According to its creators, the app aims to make the most of Aarhus’s unique wealth of Friday bars by helping users optimise their route and visit more bars in a single evening.
How to Krawl
The app has several features. It has a map showing the locations of the various Friday bars, along with information on whether they are open and, if so, when.
The app’s main feature, however, is its Krawl planner. Here, users can choose which bars they want to visit, or let the app make a random selection. The app then calculates the optimal route based on distance and opening hours, ensuring every chosen bar can be visited.
When creating a Krawl, users can also share their location with friends, making it easy to keep track of where everyone is along the route. The app also notifies users when it is time to head to the next bar.
"Your friends just need to make sure their phones are charged," explains Kristian Hedegaard
Location sharing is anonymised and visible only to your friends. Those who prefer not to share their own location can still access their Krawl and keep track of where their friends are along the route, so they never lose touch with the group.
Future plans: a kind of Strava for your TDF
The three creators hope the app can continue to be run by students, and they are already working on new features: a social feed where users can share their Krawls, much like on Strava; the ability for bars to create and promote their own events within the app; and an achievements feature showing how many bars a user has visited.
At present, the three students are funding the app out of their own pockets, but they hope it will eventually break even.
This text is machine translated and post-edited by Mie Skov Jeppesen.