There was a time when mobile application development was restricted to a single operating system be it iOS, Android or Windows. But gradually as technology advanced, so did the capabilities of mobile apps and the business of developing mobile apps became more competitive. Developers began looking at solutions that served a larger audience but with reduced developmental costs to survive the cut-throat competition. Platform independent mobile app development gained prominence and this gave rise to hybrid, cross-platform or multi-platform app development frameworks like Cordova, PhoneGap, Ionic and Xamarin. Of these frameworks, Xamarin has received wide acclaim as one of the most powerful, unique and versatile technologies. What is it about Xamarin that makes it a favorite of the developer community? Let’s analyze:
Best of both worlds with Xamarin Xamarin eliminates the dependency on native software development languages such as Java or C. But it still provides all the critical features offered by native apps. Xamarin provides support for applications built using traditional languages by offering functions and features that directly invoke native language libraries. The basic premise of Xamarin is quite simple: the app is coded entirely in C# and later compiled to work seamlessly on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac etc. Some of Xamarin’s superior features that make app development close to native:
Simple but Sophisticated App Development Xamarin simplifies cross platform mobile development and enables businesses to ship higher quality apps faster with more confidence. It allows development for all the leading platforms – using a single, shared codebase. Developers can use the same IDE, language, and APIs everywhere and automate the lifecycle of iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps. And C# is universally considered the best language for mobile app development because anything you can accomplish with Objective-C, Swift or Java, you can do with C#. Since Xamarin apps use native UIs on every platform, they give the best possible outcomes. Cross-Platform Testing Once the app is developed, you can perform a final round of testing before submitting it to the app store. Xamarin’s Test Cloud allows developers to test on multiple devices with advanced performance tracking abilities. It lets you to detect bugs and defects faster. Xamarin.Forms Another offering from Xamarin is Xamarin.Forms - a UI toolkit that enables Xamarin multi-platform application development. It allows developers to build native UI layouts that can be shared across Android, iOS and Windows. Xamarin.Forms maximizes code sharing to the fullest and is ideal for apps where developers comfortable with XAML and don’t require much platform-specific functionality. At present, Xamarin.Forms are widely used for prototyping or to build internal enterprise apps that don’t have a mass target audience, or even for simple, short-term apps. Conclusion With the surge in trends like Enterprise mobility, BYOD and the explosion of iOS and Android device usage for work and personal use, there is a great deal of pressure on businesses to provide fast and feature-rich app experiences to their employees and customers on all the major operating systems. Many projects are delayed or exceed the budget because of technical complexities of developing for each platform. Add to it the shortage of resources skilled in each platform’s unique programming language. As a result, Xamarin seems the most palatable, cost-friendly solution with its unified development, re-use of existing developer skills, and the ability to share about 90 percent of the source code across device platforms. What are your views on this? Please let us know in the comments box below. Nothing is permanent except change, and the web design and development sector is always in a state of flux. Each year the web design industry goes through an evolution of sorts with trends and influences that are both relevant and inspiring. Some changes take root and transform the way websites are designed forever, while some are just impractical, passing fads. Of late, it is UX that influences some of these trends and consequently the way applications and websites are developed. As users expect more personalized, relevant and interactive experiences from their online engagement, the benchmark is always set very high. Often custom dot net web development solutions work very well because they allow you great freedom in design and development. Building a modern interface that both pleases the user aesthetically and meets their information requirement is to find the right balance between content and design. The buzz this year is around bolder designs, immersive layouts and storytelling to a large extent. Let’s explore the essential web design and development trends for 2017 that will shape the future direction. 1. End Of Flat Design:
Flat design had emerged as a minimalist revolt to skeuomorphism which was really popular back in the day. Flat design focuses on usability, serving user needs and decluttering. However, the real challenge and struggle with flat design principles is that most websites end up looking the same, and delivering the same user experience and journey. Flat design can also be very limiting and stifling for designers and also creates a somewhat uninspiring user experience. Web design has begun to break free from ‘flatness’ in 2016 to a more creative and daring palette. 2017 may well be the year for bigger, bolder design and for ‘anything can happen’ type of creativity. 2. Greater Diversity & Asymmetry: Designers will opt for more diverse, bold and asymmetric patterns in their designs. Websites will have a more dynamic composition with geometrical look and intersecting diagonal lines. If you observe closely, this trend has already made way and we see the usage of photos that are geometric heavy, or overall site designs that rely heavily on lines and patterns. 3. Better Design-To-Development Workflows: Designers have it easier now with more sophisticated web design and prototyping tools. Dynamic visualization enables developers to create more real prototypes that shorten the feedback loop and fully functional and design and prototyping tools to improve the workflow. 4. Animation & GIFs: Interactivity and user engagement have become the guiding principles for design. As a result animation is being used more prominently on websites and it is often the best way to show how something works, how to do something or engage the user visually. The GIFs and animations used are now much more refined and use SVG and CSS to achieve the desired impact. 5. Creative Typography: Typography for the web earlier was quite restrictive and ended up using elements of the same font family and type. Web pages were dominated by simple neo-grotesque styles like Helvetica, Roboto, Lato, or Open Sans. Serif type fonts were best avoided then. But this is now changing as typography breaks away from the norm. Designers have begun using bolder, creative typefaces. There is an interesting contrast of the serif types with the non-serif ones. There is also more animated text with a variety of effects, images and colours. Texts are animated, broken down into individual letters, a variety of effects, images, and videos are placed on them. Large typography is being used on the key visual to make a statement. Final Thoughts As web designing tools and software evolve and user experience and expectations become more sophisticated, there is an evident impact on the overall look and feel and accessibility of websites. Not all trends are here to stay, but some set the tone for future design. What trends do you foresee to have that impact? Do let us know in the comments section. With outburst of data from web, mobile app, smart devices, social media, CRM and more, many organizations are facing challenges to extract value from the data being generated. Such wide availability of information is rarely stored in a single database. Analytics software and solutions help to provide a holistic view of a company’s operations based on analyzing diverse data sets which requires data integration as many systems communicate with each other and finding the data efficiency is a major challenge. Data integration is simply a process by which the information from multiple databases is united for use in a single application. In laymen’s terms, it combines parts that don’t normally fit together. Decision making requires accurate analytics, which requires accurate data integration to build dashboards, reports and visualizations that provides insights to the decision maker. If data is not cleaned, mined then it would result in queries returning useless apples-to-oranges comparisons. We require a data warehouse that can translate data across sources into a common format despite of the increase in volume and diversity of information. Information repository needs to be built up using ETL (extract, transform and load) process to ingest and clean up data on a scheduled basis, and delivers the ready-to-use information to the data warehouse. A java development company can create applications that access the data warehouse to find the information prepared for analysis. Also the need to create a strong digital footprint is needed through data integration. There are many types of data integration challenges like heterogeneity of data, isolated integration, Big bad data, which can be solved with its own unique solution. Pentaho is one of the solution which helps to deliver value faster and is scalable to meet the increasing data demands. Below are the reasons why Pentaho is ideally suited for Big Data Integration. 1. APACHE SPARK INTEGRATION - Pentaho can be easily integrated with Spark to help customers that want to incorporate this popular technology to: Lower the skills barrier for Spark, Coordinate, schedule, reuse, and manage Spark applications in data pipelines more easily and flexibly 2. METADATA INJECTION – It simply on boards multiple data types to dynamically generate PDI transformations at runtime instead of having to hand-code each data source, reducing costs by 10X. 3. HADOOP DATA SECURITY INTEGRATIONS - Securing big data environments is extremely difficult because the technologies that define authentication and access are continuously evolving. Pentaho expands its Hadoop data security integration to promote better big data governance, protecting clusters from intruders. 4. APACHE KAFKA SUPPORT - Apache Kafka’s increasingly popularity to publish/subscribe messaging system and handling large data volumes is common in today’s big data and IoT solutions. Pentaho now provides Enterprise customer support to send and receive data from Kafka, to facilitate continuous data processing use cases in PDI. 5. ENHANCED SUPPORT FOR POPULAR HADOOP FILE FORMATS - Pentaho now supports the output of files in Avro and Parquet formats in PDI, both popular for storing data in Hadoop in big data onboarding use cases. Pentaho is part of Hitachi Group company, and is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho’s unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Have you used Pentaho before to solve the data integration issues? Feel free to leave them in the comments. SharePoint tools are a great asset when a growing business wants to keep its software up-to-date. It allows you to download free templates for instant use and are designed in a way that even non-developers would find it easy-to-use.
From analyzing application code to deploying and testing it, the tools listed below can aptly assist you in your SharePoint application development life-cycle. From the several tools available, we have shortlisted the best five that provides a better SharePoint development experience. 5 Best SharePoint App Development Tools SharePoint Manager: With this tool you can browse every site on the platform, viewing each property in a simple yet intuitive way. Its interface enables a quick and easy navigation with investigating settings, properties, schema XML, and more. Most of your SharePoint environment can be investigated with the help of this tool. Debugger Canvas Tool: Debugging and maintaining the performance of your site is a tedious task. But with the Debugger Canvas tool, it becomes relatively painless. As you launch the debugger, a canvas is created which brings your code into a single-pan and zoom display, allowing you to scroll through the code you’re working on and choose a specific part to see the exact method you are debugging. It also provides the advantage of debugging multiple threads side-by-side, which helps you efficiently speed up your development. Another advantage it offers is the option to reuse the canvas bubbles when the content is same while creating new cases for each invocation of the method. Smtp4dev Testing Tool: Smtp4dev is one excellent SharePoint tool that allows you to test emails by directly viewing them in the tool’s UI, without having the access to internet. This enables easier testing through the SMTP server. It verifies its logic and correctness, even when the emails are automatically scheduled for various times. Furthermore, it doesn’t send the emails to the actual recipients and is the best option to work with things specific to emails or automated processes. CKS Dev Tool: This SharePoint app development tool is a Visual Studio extension. You can explore relevant information without leaving the app in four core areas of environment, exploration, content, and deployment. It enables you to manage your development routines and enhances productivity when you are on a coding adventure. It even adds a bunch of new items to your SharePoint project and improves your development experience. Color Palette Tool: The color palette was developed to help enterprises enhance their branding. It comes with new branding possibilities and helps you theme all the material and instantly explain your vision instead of outsourcing it to a designer. You can create and upload your exact design to the theme gallery and create a fresh ‘composed look’ which can be applied to each page on your website. It is a must-use tool for those who usually keep wobbling up with their own CSS files. These tools are commonly used by most developers and once you start exploring them, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them. If you think we’ve missed out on any other great SharePoint tools, do enlighten us through the comments. Over the years, the mobile phones have emerged from a rare necessity to a hyper operative tool. And the advent of modern technologies has introduced us to modern touch. With the mobile technology gaining more popularity each day, it has become a focal point for businesses. The intuitive user interfaces (UI) and access to high-speed data gives consumers a much better smartphone user experience. Moreover, smartphones with smarter operating systems like Android and iOS has witnessed the emergence of productivity and utility tools, gaming, and other mobile applications. This has led to increasing demand for rapid and feature-rich mobile applications. As a result, majority developers take advantage of Xamarin cross-platform development that offers various tools and add-ons to build applications faster. There are special kind of plugins Xamarin programmers can use for adding cross-platform functionality or abstract platform-specific interface to a common API. Here are some popular and must use Xamarin plugins one should leverage to develop mobile apps faster. Top 3 Xamarin Plugins For Faster App Development:
By using the above-listed Xamarin plugins your productivity significantly increases helping you reuse the code up to 90%. They are completely cross-platform and extremely light weight. But the plugin extravaganza doesn’t end with the ones mentioned here. There's a dozen of more Xamarin plugins for you to use while creating mobile apps with Xamarin. However, the exciting part of Xamarin plugins is the company also allows you contribute the plugins you have developed to its developer community. So, start adding these plugins to your mobile app projects or join Xamarin to make prominent, contributions to its community. Are you using any Xamarin plugins for your mobile app development? Or have you developed and contributed any plugins to Xamarin platform so far? Please share with us about it in the comments below. Website is the best tool to create brand presence today. Let’s say, you’ve just started your own auto parts trading business but how will you let the world know about its existence? That’s when a website can do the deed and help you catch sight of or perhaps, grab some customers.
Research says that a website that is visually appealing and interactive tends to drive more customers. Beyond the website layout and color schemes, there are ample of features that make your website stand out. And to help you put up a great website, here is a list of 50 must-have features (divided into different sections) every small business website should consist. 1. Header:
7. Other Points to Be Considered:
11. Things to Avoid If Possible:
The digital technology has drastically transformed the way travel industry functions. From the traditional paperwork methods to ticket booking and using atlas maps and travel magazines. Today, the travel industry receive thousands of bookings in a day compared to a hundred inquiries coupled with a few bookings a decade ago.
The travel businesses have undergone a metamorphosis, transforming from the conventional selling through travel agents to online selling. This opens up a multitude of options for the tech-savvy customers. Numerous channels such as mobile and the web are integrated on a single platform to provide a seamless user experience regardless of the channel used. Every channel is designed and developed keeping in mind the requirements of the device user. The requirements commonly include ticket booking and mapping options, flight and hotel room deals, local restaurant search and more. Although these features are mandatory while developing custom iPhone applications, there are some other features worth taking a note of. So, check out the following list of must-have features for developing a smart travel mobile app. 10 Features You Should Consider While Developing Travel Mobile Apps: 1. Geolocation: The geolocation services play an important role in helping customers find nearby hotels, café, and other places of their interest. So, geolocation tracking should be taken as a first turn while creating a trip mobile app. 2. Translator: A traveler exploring a foreign land will more likely feel the need of having a language translator. With the translator feature, the traveler can carry a personal interpreter right in his pocket. Certainly, some languages will not be perfectly translated but it can help two foreigners understand each other. 3. Itinerary Builder: Generating itinerary is another crucial feature a travel mobile app must have. It helps the user to arrange routes by accessing the data of current location. In a matter of seconds, they will have a route with tips for the most rational distance covering. 4. Weather Forecasting: The weather check feature will help your users plan their flights in a timely manner. Also, they can dress as per the weather conditions making themselves feel comfortable throughout the trip. 5. World Clock Time Convertor: Different time zones of different countries bring a general perplexity with being oriented in time. This is why a world time converting feature can benefit a traveler during the journey. 6. Currency Convertor: The international travel apps must implement this particular feature. It will help travelers stay aware of exchange rates without having to spend time looking for it in the middle of any station. 7. Local Emergency Services: Emergencies can arise anytime anywhere. If your app has the local emergency phone numbers listed, it will empower the traveler to minimize the consequences. 8. Taxi: While on a trip, a user can anytime encounter a need of using a cab service. This makes including a “find and book a taxi” feature to your mobile app really important. 9. Social Media Integration: If all the popular social media channels are integrated into your app, it will be a great bonus. People love to share their trip experiences and photos with their family and friends online. Including this feature will also give your business a boost. 10. Trip Reviews and Ratings: This feature allow travelers to document their adventures and rate your services. The positive reviews and ratings help in driving more customers for your business. What other features do you think are important while developing a travel mobile app? Please list them in the comments below. No wonder, smartphones are no longer a luxury item today. It has become an essential part of our daily lifestyle since Blackberry introduced Simon, the first smartphone ever. But what surprises the most is the way banking sector has transformed. Those days when we use to stand in long queues to deposit our paychecks when ATMs and direct deposits were rare are long gone. Now we have better days with mobile banking where you instantly pay off your bills, deposit paychecks, transfer funds to your family and friends with a tap. The outburst of smartphones and tablets has made us capable of carrying out these activities without having to visit a bank. The mobile banking apps have given its customers a quicker and complete access to manage their bank accounts online. Even though the banking apps offer a lot of facilities, security remains a major concern. This is why financial institutions opt for custom mobile app development to integrate extra authentication layers and safeguard its data from cyber criminals. According to Juniper Research, “Mobile banking users are expected to exceed 1.75 billion by 2019, representing 32% of the global adult population. This shows that the mobile banking technology is attracting a higher consumer demand and will change the way people do banking. Let us take a look at some important benefits that mobile banking applications offer:
Offers Convenience: Banking apps give you the ability to do most of the banking transactions on the go. Whether you want to send or receive money, check account balance and statement, or make online payments, you can control everything through the banking app. All this can happen without visiting a bank branch, ultimately making your financial life easier. Provides Instant Control: The big banks have been offering mobile banking services since 2007. They offer robust features in their apps which permit you to fully control the bank account at any point of time. For instance, PNC’s mobile banking app offers a virtual wallet to track your spending. In addition, it also offers a savings engine to help you set your savings aside automatically. Basically, you have a quick and easy access to all the financial information you require right at your fingertips. Security is no more a Problem: All the major banks and financial institutions use encryption or advanced authentication techniques that secure and protect the private and financial information as well as our identity. A few mobile banking applications provide a guarantee for securing our data while making our mobile banking experience worry-free. Saves Resources: Usage of mobile banking applications help to save some additional resources. You can save your money and time you spent in traveling to the bank branches and getting into long queues for hours. Banking apps allow you to set up recurring bill payments so you never have to worry about paying a late fee for an overdue bill. Above all, banks offer the mobile banking services at no cost. These are the biggest benefits of using a mobile banking app. Not only have these apps made banking faster but also accessible anytime anywhere. So, install a mobile banking app on your smartphone right away and take full charge of your financial life. Are you using any mobile banking application? What other benefits do you think it provides? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below. Magento is a top-ranked eCommerce platform having an unparalleled user base of 200,000. The market estimates say that 1 in 4 retailers are using Magento for their online business today. It offers a wide range of flexible tools and features which make it a preferred choice of eCommerce solution among retailers. And to add more to its users ease, Magento updated its platform to a revolutionary edition 2.0 last year.
Magento 2 has some significant updates that empower retailers to develop speedy and cost-effective online stores. It offers improved performance and scalability, new features to boost conversion rates along with business agility and productivity enhancements. The incomparable flexibility in latest version has taken development of Magento eCommerce website to whole new level. It brings in new opportunities for retailers to develop conversion-focused websites. So, it is essential for retailers to take a note of these must-use Magento 2 features to understand how they can offer an enhanced omni-channel shopping experience to their customers. Features of Magento 2.0 Enhanced Theme Development: Magento 2 is the best eCommerce platform if you want to offer your customers a theme-based web experience. It includes a plain black background for developers that enables them to add specified themes easily. It also allows you to choose the theme development features at once. Simplified Migration: Magento offers a migration tool which allows retailers to upgrade their previous version of Magento to the latest one. With this tool, you can quickly migrate your attributes, shop settings, catalogs and categories, logs, customers, orders, EAV and much more. Separate Databases: With Magento 2.0 Enterprise, you can have separate databases:
Smoothed Upgrade of Core Files and Modules: The PHP based composer function lets you upgrade the files into appropriate modules conveniently. All the core files and modules are refreshed whenever a system upgrade is performed. This makes data access effortless during time-bound business scenarios. Merged Performance With Scalability: Magento 2 comes with futuristic development tools like high-end performance toolkit, developed indexes, complete single page caching, integrated Varnish caching, and more. Being a business owner, managing the e-portal becomes easier and faster with Magento’s guided set of information. Magento 2 is not just a routine update. It changes a lot in terms of better user interface, better marketing features and overall a refined user experience. The benefits of upgrading your existing Magento 1 to Magento 2 are enormous. So, what are you waiting for? If you are aware of other exciting features of Magento 2, please share it with us in your comments. As an enterprise, the moment you decide to begin selling online, you immediately encounter questions and other obstacles. Initially, you may have to decide how you are going to procure your products, the next question could be where would you store excess inventory and so on. Once you take care of all this – you will have to face the decision of which eCommerce platform should be used. With the numerous eCommerce solutions subsisting in the market, you may come across various comparisons like – OpenCart vs Magento or PrestaShop vs OpenCart_and many more. But what matters is whether that eCommerce solution provides all types of benefits a business needs. Open-source shopping cart solutions provide many benefits to SMBs. The foremost of them is cost – most of the eCommerce platforms available are free. In addition, they can also be customized to suit a business's needs. Apart from that, they have a good number of features and support options, community backing and other resources that can help new merchants. Here's a list of some open-source eCommerce solutions that are free, with some paid extensions and support options that you can use to build your online store with.
Have you come across other feature-rich eCommerce solutions for SMBs? Let us know by commenting below. |
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