Swapping shifts with Shyft mobile app

The Seattle startup tries to lift a burden a lot of workers carry these days: swapping shifts. Its mobile app is intended to replace more cumbersome methods.

What: Shyft, a Seattle startup that has created a mobile app aiming to make it easier for workers to swap shifts.

 Who: Co-founders Brett Patrontasch, Daniel Chen, Chris Pitchford, and Kyle Liu. Patrontasch is chief executive, Chen is chief technology officer, Pitchford is director of growth, and Liu is lead mobile developer.

Birth of an idea:Patrontasch had founded another company, Scholars at Your Service, which employs student painters. He saw the difficulties the student painters had trying to coordinate their schedules.

Shift swapping: Currently, shift workers typically swap shifts using a variety of methods, including text messaging each other, posting on a group Facebook page or calling each other. Shyft aims to simplify that.

Flaw in Waze Navigation App Lets Hackers Track You

The users of a popular community-based traffic and navigation app could be the targets of stalkers thanks to a vulnerability in the app’s software. But the company says there’s an easy workaround for concerned users.
A team of computer science researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently demonstrated how drivers using the GPS-based Waze could be monitored by hackers. Using a feature of Waze that displays nearby drivers in real time, one driver can get location information about another driver instantaneously, the researchers noted in a study.

Ghost Drivers

In testing the hypothesis, the team built hundreds of fake driver profiles that they used to monitor real Waze profiles and track their locations. They did this by learning how the app communicates with Waze’s backend servers, then using that information to reverse engineer the app’s process. The team then created a software program that could send commands to Waze’s servers, creating a fleet of nonexistent cars that could report the locations of real cars.

The Waze app, which was originally called Freemap, was developed in Israel by a startup company, then acquired by Google in 2013. The program runs on smartphones and tablets with display screens that provide turn-by-turn information and user-submitted travel times and route details over mobile networks. Waze lets users add phone numbers to the registration process to cater to users who prefer sharing their locations with phone book contacts instead of a wider audience.

DHS releases government guide for mobile app development

The Department of Homeland Security released its Mobile Applications Playbook Monday, giving federal agencies a roadmap for creating, testing and deploying apps that will be shared across the government.

The 39-page guide can be used anywhere along an application’s development lifecycle, giving development teams a path forward when they are stuck on an issue related to an application’s progress.

The playbook leans on the agency’s “car wash” process, a continuous cycle that allows teams to build, manage and test source code that has caught on across the government.

Development teams can weigh whether their application would be better on mobile web versus a native app, the difference in user experience between a smartphone and a laptop, what programming language to use, what security and compliance metrics need to be accounted for, and how to test for software bugs.