Apps – Runkeeper (Pro)

Het was het begin van mijn hardloopcarrière.

Meteen na de aanschaf van heel dure hippe sportschoenen en sportkleding, begon mijn zoektocht naar een geschikte hardloopapplicatie die ervoor moest zorgen dat ik niet meteen na de eerste training een carrière burnout zou krijgen. Na een avond shoppen in de App Store vond ik mijn carrièrebegeleiders: C25K en Runkeeper.

Als je mij twee jaar geleden verteld zou hebben dat ik ooit vijf kilometer zou kunnen hardlopen zonder te stoppen, had ik je keihard uitgelachen. Maar met de geweldige features van Runkeeper is het echt gelukt. Eerst voer ik mijn trainingsschema in (uit C25K), selecteer ik mijn favoriete hardloop playlist en bepaal ik mijn route. ‘Activity started. Warm up, five minutes’, zegt mijn coach als we beginnen. Yes! Ik kan precies zien hoe hard ik loop, in km/uur (speed) en min/km (pace) en hoever ik ben in de training. Daarnaast houdt een GPS nauwkeurig mijn route bij en is het mogelijk om direct vanuit de app foto’s te maken of een hartslagmeter aan te koppelen. ‘First interval. Ten minutes, steady’, het signaal om te starten. Ik ben er klaar voor.

Als ik na veertig minuten thuiskom, ga ik direct naar de website van runkeeper, waar mijn net gelopen route met plattegrond, foto’s en alle statistieken te volgen is. Trots en voldaan maak ik gebruik van twitter, facebook en e-mail om iedereen te laten weten dat ik het weer voor elkaar heb gekregen. Op naar de tien kilometer.

Leuk *****

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Prijs € 7,99 (Pro) of gratis (Free, weinig opties)

Platform iPhone/Android

www.runkeeper.nl

We all use software daily. When surfing the web, you probably use Internet Explorer; when writing a document, you use Word; and for some easy calculations (or god forbid a graph), you use Excel. And then we have Powerpoint, which can be used for not only making presentations, but also for making figures or posters for conferences. If you want to do somewhat more complicated calculations, or make nicer graphs, you don’t use a spreadsheet but rather Matlab, the language adopted by the university for scientific computing.

All these computer programs cost money, except for Internet Explorer. For TU Delft’s students and staffers, the price is usually low: MS Office for instance costs around fifteen euro at surfspot.nl, if you have a NetID, while Matlab is free for internet-connected students and staff. However, once you leave the university, all these products – especially Matlab – cost serious money.
Now let’s assume that most readers know there are free products out there that are either as good as their commercial cousins, or better – some much better. Many of these free products are open-source software, which means that even the source is available and is developed by large groups of developers all over the world, and they also offer active user groups and mailing lists to help out with questions.

For surfing the web, the obvious choice nowadays is Firefox, a very successful open-source project. Many of the new features in the latest version of Internet Explorer were available in Firefox first. Moreover Firefox offers a number of nice add-ons to choose from for a variety of tasks, or to personalize its appearance. If you really want to be at the forefront of web surfing, you can use the new Chrome web browser developed by Google, which they’re advertising as faster, and, indeed, it is noticeably faster on my computer.

Python
For the MS Office troika, the open-source alternative is OpenOffice, which offers a word processor, spreadsheet and program for making presentations. They’re not any better or worse than their MS counterparts and have just as many annoying features, but they also offer some unique options, like the ‘export as pdf’ option under the File menu, as well as a much better equation builder. OpenOffice can read and write MS Office files, although the layout isn’t always identical.

Honestly, though, if you want to create really nice documents, especially those containing a bunch of equations, you shouldn’t use a word processor, but rather a typesetting program. For typesetting, the obvious choice is Latex. If you’re writing a thesis, paper or book, there is no better choice. You must learn a few commands, but they’re all easy and intuitive. Latex lays the text and equations out beautifully. The general rule is simple: ‘if you don’t like the layout of a Latex document, you are wrong’. If you need to make posters for presentations in class or at conferences, try Scribus: it’s a program specifically designed to combine and organize texts, figures and graphs created by other programs. Once you’re ready to print, Scribus determines the best resolution for the poster size.

For those needing to do some serious computations or make stunning graphs, use the Python programming language. Python is a superb language compared to Matlab, has a very simple and powerful syntax, offers dedicated packages for a large number of specialized tasks (like the toolkits in Matlab), and above all it is free. The latter is an especially important feature, as Matlab is very expensive. Matlab is taught at many of our university departments, but TU Delft graduates are sent out to survive in the real world, where bosses are often unwilling to dish out large sums of cash to buy Matlab and its toolkits. Why doesn’t the university teach its students a better, open-source language that they can use for the rest of their lives, wherever they may end up working?

Mark Bakker is an associate professor at the faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences