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Apps

Maties app launched

Friday, August 26th, 2016

screenshot1 The brand new Maties App was launched in the Neelsie last Wednesday. But before you experience serious FOMO, we have all the inside info for you.

The Maties app is a collaboration between Information Technology and Maties Sport after they envisioned a single place for staff and students to engage with hosted activities on campus.

Among the benefits are the promotion of an active lifestyle and getting students and staff involved with competition-based leaderboards. Users of the application will be able to follow their favourite Maties sports team to see the latest results, fixtures and news. Students will be able to keep track of their cluster or residence’s placing on campus-wide competitions.

The goal was to provide a mobile application that can serve as the initial base for further development together with stakeholders and at the same time offer immediate value to the user and university alike. In the long term you will see a larger variety of events as they get listed on the Maties App. Users will be able to get a personalised list of events they are attending and interested in – just add it to a phone’s calendar or share it with friends.

As with other social media platforms, you will be able to see how many people are also attending your event or activity. You will be able to check in at events by means of a QR code. No need for a paper ticket, just check-in at events using your app.

On the other side of the user spectrum, event organisers can disseminate important events and get students involved and active. At the same time, organisers will get an idea of how many people are interested and who have indicated that they will attend an event. No complicated form is needed since the user is already logged in and we know who is attending the event.

Additionally, users of the app will receive notifications of event information and changes, as well as campus-wide communique. Any message can be sent directly to users’ phones via the app and it can be targeted to a specific event, or to demographic (e.g. staff, students, or everyone) This function will be especially helpful during emergency situations when it is necessary to notify staff and students of important information and updates.

Curious to see what it looks like? Watch the video here or read the article on the SU homepage.

The Maties App can be downloaded for free from the Google Play store. Please let us know what you think and how we can make it better?

Tags: maties app
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Play and learn: apps for children

Friday, July 22nd, 2016

kids-apps After watching Barney, the dinosaur, or Lollos, the unidentifiable creature with the big ears, sing the same song for the twenty-seventh time this week, most parents would be desperate to find something else. Even if it’s only to preserve their own sanity.

Gone are the days when television and videos were the only available options for frustrated parents. Today technology provides another platform for distraction and one which also has the ability to educate. Phones and tablets can conveniently be loaded with apps, games, and movies.

The biggest challenge for parents is choosing the best, most appropriate, safest and most educational apps, which will also hold their child’s attention for as long as possible.

PC Advisor, one of the United Kingdom’s leading technology and media companies, attempted to make this choice easier. With the help of a group of parents, they compiled and published a list of 46 apps on their website. The apps are divided into sections for babies, toddlers, primary school scholars and teenagers. Don’t feel left out, there’s also a section for kids of all ages. That means you can also play along.

Do you have any suggestions for fun and educational apps? Let us know at bits.bytes@sun.ac.za and we’ll add your suggestions to our next article.

Tags: Apps, children, education
Posted in Apps, Communication | Comments Off on Play and learn: apps for children

Winter is movie time

Friday, June 24th, 2016

The past week’s icy weather is enough of an excuse to spend more time than usual on the couch.

But we don’t judge. Neither does Popflake, an app that attempts to improve your screen time experience.

Nowadays good movies are few and far in between. Most of us struggle to find or think of something worthwhile to watch when you have the opportunity to relax in front of the screen.

This is exactly what motivated a few students to create Popflake, an app which suggests movies based on keywords.

All you have to do, is select the keywords that represent what you are looking for in a movie, for example, horror, teenagers, woods – not the best example, but you get the concept? Keywords are meant to describe multiple aspects of the movie.

What differentiates Popflake from Wikipedia or IMDB, is that it doesn’t reveal the storyline and spoils your movie before you’ve even watched it.

All the movies are tagged by hand. So far the beta user group has tagged 820 movies and they need your help to expand their database. Just write them a message on their Facebook page, they’ll assign you access and you could be part of developing the app.

Popflake will also show the film’s rating, based on ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Metacritic.

At the moment the app is only available for iPhone, but a version for Android is being developed.

[SOURCE: www.inshorts.com, http://smashd.co, http://thenextweb.com]

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Are you an aspiring scientist?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016

sciencejournal Google just released an app which might appeal to budding scientists. It’s called Science Journal, and measures and records data in real-time by using the sensors embedded in Android phones.

The Science Journal app allows you to gather data from the world around you. By using the phone’s sensors, it measures elements in your environment, like light and sound, so you can graph data, record experiments, and organise questions and ideas.

If your main aim is to take over the world, instead of conducting small experiments for your own amusement, this might not be your cup of tea. Its main objective is to get children involved and interested in science, but it can still be fun for the adult who still wants to play.

The app is part of a larger Google initiative called The Making & Science Initiative which believes anyone can be a scientist by observing your everyday life, figuring out how things work and creating projects to improve the world.

Science Journal also allows you to make notes about your experiments and keep a digital journal – just in case you make that breakthrough discovery and forgot how it happened.

It is available as a free download from the Google Play Store and needs a smartphone running on Android 4.4 KitKat to install the 14MB app.

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How safe is information on your device?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016

Smartphones frequently act as the control centres where we schedule meetings, send e-mails and socialise. To satisfy these needs, they require personal information.

Our lives are documented and stored in e-mails, social networks and the apps we install on our phones. All this information syncs seamlessly with your work PC or your tablet. And after initial set up, it might not even prompt you for a password again. Wonderful news if you are terrible at remembering passwords. Also, wonderful news if you are the thief who steals a smartphone.

What information would a clever criminal get his hands on if you lose your smartphone now? Banking information? A copy of your ID or passport saved somewhere in your e-mail? All your holiday photos on Dropbox?

Here are a few tips to ensure he won’t be able to get to it:

Always enable the password option on your phone to lock your screen. Most phones have various options – typing in a password, a pin code or even swiping a sequence of dots. This is your first line of defence.
Don’t select “remember password” on any of your apps or your e-mail applications. Yes, it is a nuisance to type in your password, but do you really want someone else to read your e-mails?
Turn off cookies and autofill. This prevents your device from remembering your username and possibly even your password at websites you regularly visit.
If you need to access sensitive information, e.g. banking, rather go to the website, via a web browser, than using an app.
Set up your phone to be tracked if you do lose it. (Read our previous instructions on locating lost or stolen devices here.) A device can also be wiped remotely in some cases, which at least ensures that your information doesn’t end up being used, even though your actual device is.

Remember that you also need to remove ALL personal data (for example e-mails, SMS’s and telephone numbers) and anything which could connect you to the phone when you sell or dispose of it.

Posted in Apps, E-mail, Security | Comments Off on How safe is information on your device?

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