Applications in POSTECH
Applications in POSTECH
  • Reporter Lee Seung-Joo, Song Seung-chan
  • 승인 2018.10.10 18:36
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POSTECH’s Source of Information: In-Po-Stack

Logo of In-Po-Stack
Logo of In-Po-Stack


South Korea is known for its advance food delivery culture. Most cuisines- Korean, Western, Japanese, Chinese, and even Vietnamese- are available at home. To follow this trend, many applications are offering convenience to users. POSTECH Application Development Club PoApper developed the In-Po-Stack App to aid students and others in catering and other needs.


In-Po-Stack is an application and website that offers students the daily menu of each student dining facilities, such as Jigok Community Center and RIST, number and menu of various restaurants that offer delivery service and campus shuttle bus schedule. According to a survey hosted by The Postech Times 92.9% of all respondents have heard of In-Po-Stack and among them 71.4% of the students actually uses the application. Such high percentage of usage and average rating of convenience of 3.02 out of 5 shows that many students rely on In-Po-Stack for their dining needs.


However, some respondents during the survey pointed out that In-Po-Stack lacks some features compared to other delivery apps such as Yogiyo or Baedal Minjok and insisted that the update of delivery food restaurants is slow and needed. One of the respondents included on the survey that “many of the delivery food restaurants uploaded on In-Po-Stack are already gone but they are still registered on In-Po-Stack as doing business” and another included that “menu changes in certain restaurants are not applied on In-Po-Stack.” Current Poapper President Moon Min-jae (CSE 16) has answered that the information updates on In-Po-Stack are irregular and all information is derived directly from the Dorm Union homepage. He also answered several questions regarding to the iOS version of In-Po-Stack by indicating that there were many trials to develop an iOS version of In-Po-Stack but never led to actual realization. 


Moon asserts that compared to other delivery applications, In-Po-Stack has much wider variety of restaurants and does not require any service fees. Regardless of some faults, many appraise In-Po-Stack for its convenience and adequacy to campus life.

 

Keep Track of your Schedule with Lemons
 

Logo of Lemons
Logo of Lemons

Due to limited time resource and tight schedules to master, many university students utilize mobile applications to keep track of their time. Nowadays most university students use 'EveryTime', which is an application devoted to scheduling. Its features include not only include schedule planning but also offers means of anonymous communication in school campus and can share schedules with other friends who use EveryTime. PoApper developed their own scheduling program, Lemons, and has allowed all students to freely utilize it to keep track of their precious time.


Lemons was first launched in 2015 as a lecture evaluation platform and scheduler. Present President of PoApper, Moon Min-jae (CSE 16) asserted that Lemons was developed due to the difficulty in viewing POVIS-made schedules. It was from then widely used among students because widely used schedule applications weren’t commercialized in the past. However, from this  May, Lemons became exclusively a scheduling program with appealing features. As the system was made for mainly students, Lemons took advantage of the course syllabus of all lectures in POSTECH and offered information of each lecture’s scheduled time, professor in charge, location of lecture, number of credit, etc. for students to take account when scheduling their semesters. This feature made it distinguishable among other scheduling applications due to the convenience and omission of the effort to type in every information. Due to the commercialization of EveryTime and other schedule applications, Lemons have lost its place in POSTECH. According to the survey hosted by The Postech Times, only 54.8% heard of Lemons schedule before and only 23.8% actually uses it. Respondents included that they would 'rather use EveryTime like other universities' and that 'searching for each lecture is tiresome.' The president of PoApper was asked if there are any plans on developing a mobile application to access Lemons. However, he answered that currently no such plans exist. 

 

Order Before You Get There

Logo of POVI Order
Logo of POVI Order

 

When a student goes to the cafeteria for lunch or dinner, he is faced with a long line of people who are checking out the menu and pondering which food to get. When the line is long, it takes about five to get to the ordering machine. That waiting time, albeit not extremely long, may mean a lot for those who have only an hour of break.


POVI Order application is invented to shorten that waiting time. When the application is opened, the list of menus is presented with the waiting list next to it. The customer then clicks on the picture of menu and the application leads to ordering page. Then, when the customer gets to the cafeteria, he skips the ordering line and goes directly to get his food.


Although POVI Order is an ingenious application, it has its flaws. In the survey conducted by The Postech Times¸ majority of the complaints had to do with order omission and automatic log-out. In the interview with  Assistant Manager of General Affair Choi Hye-shik, he confirmed that “the problem with order omission is acknowledged and the application development team is working on fixing the problem.” Choi elaborated that the cause of the problem is “data transmission error to the kitchen printer after the order.” It is projected to take around four weeks for the program to be fixed and be effective. As of the automatic log-out, Choi explained that the log-in is maintained for 28 hours, and it is logged-out if the user logs into another school related application. The cause is the authentication error with the school’s IDAP system, which is the simple protocol used for internet or directory list access, and the development team is working on finding the solution.

 

POSTECH Electronic Attendance Application

Logo of POVION
Logo of POVION

Some attendances at POSTECH is done through ID cards. But taking out wallet every time a student enters the classroom is bothersome. This process can get frustrating if there is a long line behind the student or if there are only a few seconds left until the attendance turns into lateness.


POVION, which is POSTECH electronic attendance application, is invented to lessen the burden of attendance. POVION uses beacon to check attendance so that students do not have to wait in line. When the student logs into the application, the class that the student is in appears and the student has to click a big circle that says conformation required. However, by changing the setting, the student can let the application send beacon automatically. 


However, there has been a doubt regarding the reliability of POVION. In a survey performed by The Postech Times, nine out of 42 students claimed that they have experiences where they used POVION but the attendance came out as absence. In the interview with Hye-Shik Choi, Assistant Manager of General Affairs, he informed that there were “25 registered cases since March of 2017.” However, “16 of them were the results of user carelessness,” such as using building entrance system as attendance and using attendance before the attendance time for the class. Two of them were the result of authority conflict. But seven of them were the result of system error: beacon-shadow area in the room, weak beacon signal, and SAP data synchronization problem. But, other than those few cases, 25 out of 42 students claimed that POVION is trustworthy.