Apparently, whatever we need in life, there’s an app for it. And with the meteoric rise of the android smartphone, portable tablet and light and compact notebook showing no sign of slowing down, this probably won’t come as much surprise to you.
With the sheer volume of handy apps available, the majority of us are beginning to wonder how we ever survived without having a tool to regularly check the weather in the Outer Hebrides or track our daily bowl movements (yes, this is a real app) We’re using apps increasingly to organise both our business and social lives and reaping the benefits in both.
However, the demographic most reliant on electronic devices to organise their lives are students, who have turned to technology for every day tasks such as checking grades, ticking items off their things to do list and organising their homework schedule.
Our kids have grown up using this ever-improving technology and are becoming increasingly reliant on apps to determine their every move. Long gone are the days of having to stock up on dictionaries, calculators and note-books, new terms now are all about getting the right apps on the right device.
Within an increasing number of schools, rather than being punished for having a phone at school, teachers are beginning to embrace the technology and alternative learning opportunities apps offer them. Teachers are regularly using apps such as Socrative and Skitch to engage students with educational exercises and interactive activities that the whole class can share.
Aside from the educational benefits, students are benefitting from apps such as Stylebook to organise their wardrobe and make outfit decisions based on the clothes they have available.
It’s not just the teens who are incorporating digital technology and apps into their everyday lives; schools, pre-schools and even nurseries are using apps to help them educate, inspire and organise children - playing interactive learning games to help children with their letter formation and word pronunciation, and flashcard apps to help with revision and study. [Advertorial]
Skype's got a new audio codec that it thinks you should be pumped about, and it's called "Opus." It's been kicked around at Skype since March 2009, though work didn't begin in earnest until June of the same year, and it was just certified by the IETF as a standard of online audio. Senior Skype architect Koen Vos lead a team of audio engineers to create the hybrid audio codec, combining Skype's own "SILK" codec with Xiph.Org's "CELT" codec, intending to create a low-bandwidth codec "designed for the internet." But what does that mean for us? It means "CD quality" audio (fullband stereo sound) over Skype, regardless of internet connection. And what about those pesky packet loss issues that cause Skype calls to often sound choppy? "It has multiple mechanics to deal with and recover from packet loss plaguing the network," promises audio/video product engineering director Karlheinz Wurm. So ... uh, less of a chance of sounding like an Autobot then? Great!
