Monthly Archives: June 2019

Housing Justice is a national charity based in London. With over 60 years’ experience it is one of the oldest housing and homelessness charity in the UK. Today it is active in over 35 communities across the UK funding housing advice centres, community regeneration projects and supporting church-based homelessness projects.

It is also responsible for organising Homelessness Sunday, held in January each year. As well as providing practical help to homeless people, predominantly those classified as ‘statutory homeless’ – i.e. accepted as homeless under the terms of the homelessness legislation – Housing Justice also campaigns against homelessness, lobbying politicians as appropriate.

We were asked to develop and build an online grant application platform for Housing Justice. Currently this supports their Equipping Shelters programme, and will be expanded to cover further programmes in the future. Applications for funding for up to £20,000 can be made online, for monthly rounds of funding grants.

As well as basic information such as contact details, our system also caters for budget tables, file uploads for financial information, signatures (compatible with both mouse and finger/touch), narrative passages, and more. Applications are delivered directly to Housing Justice, and the details are automatically merged into designed summary documents for review meetings.

The fantastic design of the online system and the summary documents is by our partners at Metric.

The time has come for the end of iTunes. Launched back in 2001, iTunes has had a tough journey to win users hearts and has often been rated as slow and bloated.

It was announced at their Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), that Apple are getting rid of iTunes on macOS in favour of three separate applications: Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts. Each app will handle their own media, from finding and playing content to purchasing it and saving it to a library where applicable. “The future of iTunes is not one app, but three.” Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, stated at the WWDC. The change is set to take place with the planned arrival of OS X 10.15, code-named Catalina, in September.

Some concerns were made regarding how Macs would continue to sync with iPhones or iPads without using iTunes, but it was reported that this will be handled by macOS itself, with options showing in the finder menu rather than in iTunes.

Despite the slowness, iTunes initially became the blueprint for how people could legally download media, making it significantly easier to pay for music rather than steal it from early file-sharing sites like Napster. Apple soon dominated digital downloads allowing it to set the terms, something the music industry came to resent. Apple’s focus on unbundled 99-cent tracks caused many artists and record labels to accuse Apple of stripping the value out of music.

iTunes redefined how people listened to music and watched films but over time it became widely mocked for being slow and bloated as Apple added more and more features. Today with music applications such as Spotify, which allow instant streaming and downloading, iTunes has been knocked out of the market.

However, iTunes won’t completely disappear yet. iTunes will still be available on Windows as a Win32, x64 and UWP app for the foreseeable future. The iTunes store will also remain on Macs for all downloading in a proprietary file format needs. Nevertheless, Apple will eventually stop supporting iTunes and it will become redundant.

The success of iTunes is huge, it outlived pretty much every other consumer-focused piece of software from its time, also Windows 10 users searched for iTunes so much in the Windows Store that they had to relent and bring it to the store last year. However, over the years through adding extra features and additions to iTunes, the usage has become very slow and painful. In addition to this, the market has moved onto cloud storage and streaming media has become easier and normalised. Now it is time to move on from iTunes.

WhatsApp was co-founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009. Koum and Acton have strong values towards data protection and user privacy. However, since its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, the app has been subject to data and user privacy complaints.

Koum released a statement after the acquisition, which promised to keep user data protected and stated the importance of this to him personally. But Koum decided to leave the Facebook owned WhatsApp in 2018 – following a dispute over these exact values.

Two years before the Facebook takeover, Koum explained WhatsApp’s stance towards advertising by quoting the movie Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can by shit we don’t need…Remember, when advertising is involved, you the user are the end product.” Mr Acton, who left Facebook earlier in 2017, tweeted in March 2018: “It’s time. #deletefacebook.” and hasn’t posted anything since.

According to The New York Times, Koum was growing “increasingly concerned” by Facebook’s focus on collecting and selling user data. In 2016, WhatsApp introduced full end-to-end-encryption, meaning all messages, file transfers and voice calls are scrambled between users’ phones. But, with Koum’s departure, there have been concerns WhatsApp won’t stay so committed to the protection of users data or privacy.

It was feared that WhatsApp would start leveraging advertising at some point. And, a year after this report, it has been announced that WhatsApp will be introducing adverts in 2020. This was confirmed at Facebook’s annual Facebook Marketing Summit. Conference attendee Olivier Ponteville shared photos of the presentation. The ads appear to take up the entire screen of a smartphone, and offer users a call to action to find out more information by swiping up – this is unlikely to be a welcomed feature across the vast user base (over 1.5 billion active users at the start of 2019).

Following a series of data and privacy scandals, and now with the addition of advertising, it is worth considering moving away WhatsApp. Brain Acton has since turned his attention to private messaging app Signal, which is overseen as part of the not-for-profit Signal Foundation, founded in 2018. Signal is a better alternative to WhatsApp which you should consider switching to – it has end-to-end encryption, a fully transparent platform, a commitment to never using advertising, and does not monetise your messages/activity.

See also our previous post regarding why WhatsApp is not compliant for a work environment.