IIT Stuart Undergrad Launches App for Windows 8

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IIT Stuart School of Business undergraduate student Rytis “Ray” Bizauskas recently launched his first custom app — a sleep cycle calculator called Sleepr — in the Windows 8 Store. With the guidance of Martin Schray, a senior technical evangelist at Microsoft, Bizauskas has been developing template apps throughout recent semesters at various on-campus Microsoft events and in his spare time. At the recent MonkeyBars hackathon, “The Forge,” Bizauskas created the Sleepr App with Schray’s help. Sleepr allows users to input data related to when they need to go to sleep and/or when they need to wake up, and then suggests optimal sleep times based on sleep cycle patterns. Bizauskas’ business and entrepreneurial studies helped form the original concept, and IIT courses in Java gave him the technical skills he needed to program the custom app himself. In the future, Bizauskas will add features to Sleepr to enhance the user experience as well as adapt to other platforms. The skills gained from this app will contribute to the development of his time management app, which has been in research since he took BUS 203: Ideation in Fall 2012. Bizauskas is a sophomore majoring in Business Administration with a minor in Information Technology Management, and he expects to graduate in 2016. He goes by the alias “Third Dimension Dev” on the Windows Store. Read more about Ray’s development process on the Microsoft Developer Network blog.