Bryan Dubno overheard more than sandwich orders while standing in the Reitz Union Subway line Sunday. He stood between two UF students who were talking about one of his cherished inventions: the UFmobile iPhone app.
“It’s cool to see people actually using it,” said Dubno, a 22-year-old UF computer science and engineering senior.
On Aug. 22, the first day of the Fall semester, UFmobile was used about 64,000 times. Since Dubno created the free iPhone app in 2009, it has had 29,000 downloads.
His first app, Nutrifacts on the Go, received about nine downloads in its lifetime. It was a project for the science fair his sophomore year at Spanish River Community High School, and it gave users nutritional information on fast food restaurants.
Despite its imperfections, the young developer was proud that he was able to create the app without formal training.
“It was on my own learning,” he said. “It gave me a sense of independence.”
Dubno enrolled at UF in 2008 as an exploratory engineering major, but after taking a beginning Java course his freshman year, he discovered his passion for computer science and engineering.
“I had a great professor, and that’s what got me into it,” he said.
But the self-starter always had a curiosity for how things worked. He said that as a child, he would take apart little things, like a car set, to try to figure them out.
He also took advantage of online resources and books at a young age, which helped set the path for nomtasticapps.com, which displays the other four apps he created: Translate FREE and StudySets for Spanish, Psychology and French, trumping the UFmobile app with about 300,000 downloads.
His latest additions to UFmobile — dining hall, library and tutoring hours and enhancements in the Wall feature (unread message notifications, the ability to copy posts and select chat bubble and crowd moderation) — were released in the spring.
“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Dubno said. “The reviews are heartwarming.”
Last August, he released the app’s redesigned version 2.2, which includes an augmented reality camera that allows users to easily pinpoint their classes’ locations, a UF news feed, an event calendar, the ability to import course schedules from the Integrated Student Information System, RTS route information, a UF directory and a live feed from Southwest Recreation Center cameras that allows users to see if the gym is busy before heading over.
The app is popular among UF students and faculty and has been used in places such as Australia, China and Europe.
“It’s used all over the world for some strange reason. I guess the Gator nation is really everywhere,” Dubno said, chuckling.
Corey Flayman, Dubno’s 19-year-old marketing intern, can somewhat account for that. Flayman’s uncle, a UF alumnus, introduced him to UFmobile while he was in high school, and he downloaded it before he was admitted to UF last year.
“I was surprised when I realized a student created it,” he said. “It was so effective. I thought it was a UF professional’s work.”
The telecommunication sophomore has been interning with Dubno since the spring. Although they communicate primarily via email, they are a cohesive team.
“It’s a nice relationship,” Dubno said. “It’s not like I’m his boss.”
Flayman said he likes that Dubno gives him the ability to develop his own ideas. It’s his job to promote the app on social media and get people to download it on a day-to-day basis.
“It would be nice if the university picked it up,” Dubno said. “A lot of people still don’t know about it.”
As for now, word-of-mouth conversations in restaurant lines have proven worthy.
UF computer science and engineering senior Bryan Dubno, 22, the creator of UFmobile, uses the free iPhone app on campus. The app includes an interactive campus map to help students find their classes.
