Indoor mapping software startup Meridian, continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering.
Called Zones, the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps.
TechCrunch
netbuzz writes “Educause members and 7,000 university websites are being forced to change account passwords after a security breach involving the organization’s .edu domain server. However, some initially hesitated to comply because the Educause notification email bore tell-tale markings of a phishing attempt. ‘Given what is known about phishing and user behavior, this was bad form,’ says Gene Spafford, a Purdue University computer science professor and security expert. ‘For an education-oriented organization to do this is particularly troubling.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mark Zuckerberg invented Poking, one of Facebook’s earliest features, so it’s fitting he was part of the small team who built the new Poke app over the last twelve days. Sources say Zuckerberg actually wrote code for Poke despite saying he rarely programs for Facebook anymore. And that voice that blurts out “Poke” when you get a push notification about a new Poke message? That’s Zuck too.
TechCrunch
Via Planet KDE, some good news for people who hate the KDE 4 notifications applet (coming in KDE 4.10): “So, it seems it’s that time of the year again… the plasmoid used in KDE Plasma Desktop to display notifications and the progress of transfer jobs started to really show its age, due to some bad limitations in the old QGraphicsview code to handle complex layouts, so it appeared quite buggy and not so smooth to use. … The fact that there is some research/development being made to build a new backend for notifications that will support many new features, more ‘modern’ to be actually useful with the applications that are so heavily ‘communication’ oriented (both desktop clients and web stuff), that became essential part of out workflow. … The story begins more than a year ago: we needed a way to display notifications on Plasma Active, and obviously the desktop applet used back then wasn’t enough. … Since we would have to rewrite it in QML anyways, we started it.”
The article has two videos: one of the new UI in Plasma Active on a tablet, and another of it on the desktop. They share basically the same code base, differing only by a couple hundred lines of QML. In addition to this, another KDE developer has been musing on a replacement for the freedesktop.org notification protocol designed to fix the deficiencies that have made themselves apparent over the last few years (parts one and two).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The popular third-party notification system now integrates well with Apple’s notification service.
[Read more]
CNET News
If there’s something on Facebook that won’t stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook’s new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Facebook.com homepage’s globe icon drop-down and click the ‘x’ for the option to turn off notifications from that app, group, event, or post you commented on.
Facebook has confirmed with me this is an official new feature. Previously you had to dig your way to the dedicated Notifications Settings page, and there was no way to turn off a specific source of alerts — you had to silence all your events or all your posts.
TechCrunch
eldavojohn writes “Describing Notifications as ‘somewhere between email and IM,’ Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, ‘It’s important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla’s push notification system moves beyond that limitation.’ Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has proposed a bill that would require all phone companies to notify consumers of any user tracking and monitoring software in their cell phones.
Computerworld News
Imagine you’re walking down the block when, suddenly, your phone goes off. You take it out of your pocket, unlock that sucker and pull down the notification bar to reveal… an ad! The idea of such a travesty is enough to make our blood (which is primarily just liquid caffeine and taurine at this point) boil. Disturbingly enough though, this isn’t some terrifying dystopian Android future — this is the reality for at least some KDDI au customers. The Japanese carrier bundles the au one Market on many of its handsets as an alternative to the standard Google offering, and a recent update to the third party app outlet has it sending ads as push notifications to users. It’s similar to Airpush, a service that offers both push notifications and ads as homescreen icons, which suffered a serious backlash shortly after launching. Of course, the carrier market can’t be removed (at least not without a little bit of hackery) which makes this a practically unforgivable offense. Oh, and a quick message to any American carriers considering a similar move: don’t even think about it.
KDDI putting ads in the notification bar on Android phones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Continue reading Toyota demos Prius’ proximity notification system, touts ‘futuristic’ purr (video)
Toyota demos Prius’ proximity notification system, touts ‘futuristic’ purr (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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