apps
EasySMS App Allows Illiterate People To Read, Compose And Send Text Messages
For you and I the english spoken language comes naturally, reading it, writing it is generally not a problem. However there are some people in the world who do not have the fortune of going to school and getting an education, so for them reading and writing in their own language, not just english, can be quite daunting and near impossible. Which is why this year, during the course of a mobile interaction design class at Lausanne Switzerland’s EPFL, students had to come up with an idea for, and to design an application on mobile phones which will help to improve the livelihoods of people living in rural communities in developing countries, and one of their projects that they came up with was EasySMS.
The group that created the EasySMS application had this to say about their app:
“About 700 million illiterate people in developing countries are currently excluded from the benefits of text messaging. Most of them reside in rural areas in which mobile phone coverage and ownership is growing rapidly and SMS are cheap or even free.
EasySMS application empowers illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages through available text-to-speech solutions to their contacts.
The composition of messages is facilitated through pictograms and previously received messages. Contact identification is aided by visually search-able avatars.
To understand the meaning of each word of the SMSs users receive not only the meaning of the whole message: –> the message is played in a karaoke like style –> each word of the message is a playable button: the user can click on each word to hear it.”
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!