Main Page: pennmate.com
Github Page: Penn Automate
LinkedIn Page: Penn Automate | LinkedIn
Introduction
On that special day, I missed twice the email from PennCourseNotify and PennCourseAlert for EAS-203, so I was a bit angry.
This is when the idea of Penn Automate comes up. Penn Automate stands for a series of simple apps that help Penn students automating tasks that are usually repetitive or hard for humans.
Penn Automate is usually abbreviated to Pennmate as a prefix to all apps affiliated with this project. This project is planned to be fully open-sourced on Github.
The website for this project is still under construction by the time you see this post, but it is planned to be created in the next few weeks, depends on the feedback given to the first app.
Technical Details
The server is hosted on AWS Lightsail.
The main backend is written in PHP with Nginx as webserver and MySQL as database.
Go is used for microservices, snippets, and daemons to assist with the services.
Flutter and Dart is used for writing mobile Apps. Other cross-platform frameworks such as React Native is in consideration.
Bootstrap and jQuery is the framework currently used for front-end projects.
Mobile Apps
Pennmate Notify
Github page: Pennmate Notify App
The notification by email is not stupid—it’s just slow. The process of sending emails is not concurrent; The email would take much more time to actually arrive at your inbox; Massive emails from the same address could trigger anti-spam; The message might simply won’t pop-up, or easily mixed with other of your emails.
Also, there will be privacy concerns if you give out your email and the course you want to be in at the same time. The data could be easily correlated to your individual identity and used to figure out how you planned your schedule. I heard[citation needed] that PennLabs is already doing this when you fill in your course on Penn Mobile.
So now forget about all that and embrace Pennmate Notify. An app that pushed simplicity and functionality to its maximum and does nothing other than telling you the course is open at the shortest notice.
Download
Google Play: Pennmate Notify - Apps on Google Play.
This app is written in Dart and uses the Flutter framework. It is natively a cross-platform app, meaning that it can run on both iOS and Android devices.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to install an app from an unknown source on unjailbreaked iOS devices. The only way for me is to obtain a developer account from Apple, which would cost me $99/yr. im cute plz give me money
Browser Extension
Pennmate Notify
Github page: Pennmate Notify Chrome
Download: Pennmate Notify - Chrome Web Store