This school year has brought other news apart from epidemiological control: the redesigned, modernised version of the Felt Diary has arrived.
Two years ago, Chalk, a system designed to replace paper-based checks, became mandatory. Its history is probably familiar to many students, parents and teachers. Since its launch, there have been problems, which have been corrected from time to time, but because of this, the user experience and impression of it is, to put it mildly, not the right one.
How it was made, what it was made of and what the result was, I won't go into details, let's just look at the dry facts: An 18-year-old student has developed a much better client application, free and royalty-free, with the source code available on GitHub, i.e. an open source solution.
Yes, we need the past tense, unfortunately, because the app, which was called e-Szivacs at the time, was made impossible to use after many attempts.
It was a shame, and a nuisance, especially as the app has become quite popular, and not without reason. It was much better than Chalk's own client, and more stable, with a more modern look and more features. Was.
Hook for the sponge. What happened next?
Then - through being open source, - a fork was made, called Felt Diary. Patching the Sponge, the team stuck with it until the end of the last academic year, when they decided they needed something new, something more modern, something better. This became the Felt Diary 2.0, or will be, as it is still in development.
The new version is now available to everyone from the Play Store, via this link.
Since, after about three years of testing, the developers of Chalk have got their act together and made a much more usable app, currently in development but already available for testing, the purpose of Filc has changed: it can do basic Chalk functions as well, as the developers put it:
"Over time, we want to turn the app into a full-fledged school assistant that helps you manage your time and gives you useful advice."
So it's going to be a great app over time, over the course of the school year, which is - and this is very important - transparent, transparent, doesn't steal data, and you can make suggestions about what you need.
In addition, a Filc Lite app, optimised for weaker devices, is coming soon.
If you miss the Sponge Diary or are interested in it, both as a parent and as a student, take a look to. It's worth a try.
