MechChem Africa February 2017

Apps to make an engineer’s life easier At the SAIChE IChemE Gauteng members’ group meeting last year, Carl Sandrock, a senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria, presented a talk about software applications (apps), highlighting those that may be of particular interest to engineers.

T he world of electronic applications (apps) has always been associated with high school teenagers using Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the many other social media apps, to tell the worldwhat they had for dinner orwithwhom theywent to themovies. Hearing about other apps that are designed to make engineers’ lives easier was therefore quite refreshing. And while I recognise that some people are

Collaboration: Another very useful group of apps can be used for online collaboration. Working togetherwithgroups of people scat- tered across the city, the country or even the globe, can be a logistical nightmare but, with apps such as Dropbox, www.doodle.com, forms.google.com and Trello you can set up meetings – and synchronise them with your personal calendar – upload documents for people to add their contributions and set

allows you to take photos of your old pho- tos – you know

that box in your attic – which the app then converts to an electronic picture by remov- ing the shine from the flash and cropping out everything that is not the original photo. Google Photos also uses facial recognition to put together albums and animations of

people you regularly take pictures of. These get stored in your Google+ account and you never again have to worry about losing your phone or the photo albums in your study. It also allows you to search your pictures forwhat they contain, for instance finding all the pictures of babies or puppies. Electronic signatures: Lastly, never again agree to scanning and emailingadocumentwithyoursig- natureon it.With the introduction of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 (ECT Act) South Africa followed a global trend to recognise the

vehemently opposed to our smart- phones runningour lives, here are some apps that will undoubtedly help you to manage your life bet- ter, personally andprofessionally. Passwordmanager: Let’sstart with your passwords. You prob- ably have one or two passwords that youuse for all your accounts, from logging into your computer at work to accessing your online banking profile. And you know deep down that this is a bad idea but the alternative is keeping a diary and hoping that you never lose it. The answer is a pass- word manager such as KeePass.

The ECT Act clearly indicates that electronic signatures are legally recognised in South African law.

KeePass is a freeopen sourcepassword manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So youonly have to remember one singlemaster password or select the key file to unlock the wholedatabase. Thedatabases areencrypted using the best andmost secure encryption al- gorithms currently known (AES andTwofish). For more see http://keepass.info/.

legality of electronic signatures. The ECT Act defines an ‘electronic signature’ as ‘data attached to, incorporated in, or logically associatedwith other data andwhich is intended by the user to serve as a signature’ . The ECT Act further provides – in Section 13(2) – that: ‘an electronic signature is not without legal force and effect merely on the grounds that it is in electronic form’ . This clearly indicatesthatelectronicsignaturesarelegally recognised in South African law. For simple signatures, a picture of your signature is legally equivalent to writing your name in plain text on thedocuments.Makeuseof apps such as Adobe Acrobat or GnuPG to create cryptographically secure signatures, which allows you to detect if a document has been tamperedwith. GnuPG is a complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880, also known as PGP. GnuPG allows encrypting and signing your data and communication, features a versatile key management system as well as access modules for all kinds of public key directories. For the full presentationbyCarl Sandrock, please visit http://tinyurl.com/saiche-apps orfollowCarlonTwitterat@chthonicdaemon. Written on behalf of SAIChE IChemE Gauteng Members Group by Zita Harber.

up tasks with reminders to ensure that your project runs smoothly. Google+: Gone are the days that Google is merely a search engine; having a Google+ account will absolutely change your life, especially if you use a smartphone that runs on Android. Switching on the location setting on your device lets you use GoogleMaps as a GPS –personally I ama proponent ofWaze as

aGPS app, since it tells youwhen to leave if you don’t want to be late for your next appointment, but I digress. With Google Maps you also have a history of when and where you went, which can beusedas a travel log, and it picks up when you are in a shopping centre and you get a notification of the relevant store directory. From your travel history it an- ticipates when you are travelling to work or home and warns you about traffic incidents on the way. It’s a lifesaver. Google Photos: Still on the same platform, Google Photos uses machine learning that

With apps such as Dropbox and Trello, you can set up meetings and synchronise them with your personal calendar, upload documents for sharing and set up tasks with reminders.

6 ¦ MechChem Africa • February 2017