Bibliographies in a Snap

Need help with that annotated bibliography for Expos? There's an app for that.

QuickCite, a 99-cent application for iPhone and Android, automates the task of making a bibliography. Users take a picture of a book's barcode using a virtualized barcode scanner. QuickCite then translates the barcode into a properly formatted citation and sends the citation to the user's e-mail.

The application, which has already been featured in PC and Fast Company magazines, was created by a group of seven undergraduates from the University of Waterloo.

The team, known as 7Cubed, challenged themselves to create seven applications over the course of a week. The original version of QuickCite, which took the group only 12 hours to develop, was the first of their projects.

Gareth MacLeod, one of the application's developers, said that he expects that QuickCite will be especially popular among college-level students and other people for which academic writing and bibliographies are a must.

"QuickCite is an amazing app, and it's going to save a lot of people a lot of time in the future," MacLeod said.