Wednesday, October 29, 2014

HTML5 Mobile App Development- The Right Way To Go for Your Business


Most of the new development in mobile apps is being driven by focus on user experience. And with a recent study showing how less is the patience threshold of a user is, adding to the point of maximum user experience.

Along with growth in the number of data points, more enterprises now require to implement a cross-platform development strategy and HTML5 has become the preferred platform.

Rich User Experience at Low Cost

The key driver of html5 mobile app development is powerful audio and video support, highly advanced accessibility and more storage capabilities. Also, HTML5 reduces the risk of vendor lock-in as it is an open format interchangeable between mobile and web. Developers wanting greater choice of tools and more support in the open source community are not limited by proprietary plug-ins.

Cross-platform compatibility

The most attractive features of HTML5 is its compatibility across a range of devices, whether that’s iOS, Android, Windows Phone or Blackberry. Though it takes longer time to create an HTML5 app than it does to create a single native app, over looking at the fact, multiple apps need to be developed while you only have to build it once using HTML5.

To Create Good Trade-Off Hybrid Apps

native apps (and can indeed be published on app stores) are fairly popular nowadays so does hybrid apps built using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then ‘wrapped’ in a native container.
The Drive of Huge Developers Community.

One of the biggest advantages is the huge community that involves front-end and back-end developers to providing new tools and support. Either directly or indirectly most of the companies develop product or services cordially on the web. This whole ecosystem of applications is developed by a thriving community of developers who understand the backend side of the equation.

As I conclude, HTML5 has got both advantages and limitations, but leveraging the former and overcome the latter is what sets apart successful enterprise business apps. Choose the right tool for the right job!

5 Expenses That Might Surprise You during An App Development



With enterprise mobile app development outpacing desktop applications, here’s bound to be some surprises along the way. But many first timers with a limited understanding of the true costs of developing a mobile app happen to believe that development cost starts and ends with the developer.

This outlines to the big question of the hour: What unexpected costs should businesses plan for when developing an Android or iPhone apps?


5 Unexpected Costs to Watch Out For When Building Mobile Apps For Your Business

1. Keeping an App in the App Store Isn’t Free

For businesses heading into mobile app development need to understand the fact that Apple and Microsoft charge $99 per year, while Google charges a one-time $25 fee- certainly aren’t deal breakers, of course.This applies for native and hybrid apps and not for mobile web apps.

2. Building Mobile Apps for Multiple Platforms Costs More

As a matter of fact, each mobile platform requires different programming languages as in like native mobile iOS app won’t work on Android and an Android app won’t work on iPhones. The cost is more expensive considering that you need specialized engineers for both OS.

3. Unaware Of How Much Actually Takes Place on A Server

From registration, to backup, to sync etc, backend data programming could spike up development costs very quickly. So here’s the quick question. Where do you store your mobile app data? In case it is a data-driven application, you must store the data somewhere.  But on the cloud, you will have monthly hosting costs depending on the provider and the amount of data stored.

4. The Necessity of Testing Your App

People commonly think that their design will provide a great experience and the app will work perfectly immediately. But it isn’t. Only with thorough testing, you can ensure that people are finding the app valuable but then, it will cost more money up front.

5. Maintenance And Updating Costs

Mobile market is constantly shifting between OS or changes in the APIs and device compatibility updates. But bear in mind that maintenance cost far outweighs the initial cost of building the app when your users are more focussed on rich features.

Building apps for consumer distribution is a very important point but unfortunately, this is not cheap.



Monday, October 27, 2014

Native or Hybrid: Which Technology Should Businesses Prefer For App Development Project



Well, mobile app development has been widely spread now but the debate of choosing native and hybrid mobile application development technologies is really a matter of being confused. How to hire a mobile application development company guides available online and one of them provide you the best of the information.

Going with one among native, or hybrid is a bit difficult decision but knowing about all the two should be used as per the stage the project is.


Going Native

Are you new to mobile development and want to build performance-critical mobile apps and/or take advantage of native APIs? Then, you need expert app developers to build the best performance apps you can get from the mobile phone.

Building native applications means using Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android but the process can be relatively long for complex applications. The application development is faster, simpler, more rapid and easy to maintain.


Going Hybrid

If you decided to develop hybrid applications, developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript allows you to use any web-native framework you want. There are two main ‘competitors’ in this field targeting mobile platforms but work in very different ways:

1. Cordova based on tools like PhoneGap and

2. Appcelerator Titanium

Developing with Cordova is just like developing a webpage using HTML, CSS and JavaScript local files, and tests them in the browser and then wraps them in a native web view with Cordova.

Whereas, Titanium don’t require HTML and CSS files unless you want to create an application that uses both native and HTML-based User Interfaces. It provides a mobile tool set that helps you emulate your application on the real platform.


Both are the either or the perfect solutions to fulfill the different needs and preferences of users and developers. So, which one you will use in your application?

Sharing the Secrets Of IOS8 for App Vendors: Better Experience-Better Life



Apple announced iOS 8 will be very interactive- a feature that has long been available to Android app developers and long sought after by iOS app developers. Most interestingly, they also announced "extensibility," feature to let users to share data and interact with one another.

Underscoring the battle between iOS and Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android, the company has unveiled a wide range of new tools and services available to its iOS developers gearing towards making it easier for developers to build iOS applications and making those applications easier to find and use by customers. Let’s see a few of such important tools in detail.

CloudKit: A new service from Apple that will store applications' data in order the ease the job for developers to build cloud-based services for their iOS applications.

Metal: This new technology works with the OpenGL specification to speed up the performance of graphically intensive iOS games apps development for companies like Unity and Epic Games.

Apple ID Management: All these years, Apple IDs & billing info could only be changed through that oh-so-passe program called iTunes on a computer but with iOS8, you can update your info right through your phone and forget wiping the dust off your laptop screen.

Extended Privacy:  The new OS offers a hide function for photos and App Store purchases in order to conceal your private photos.

Swift- a new programming language for iOS developers: Seated alongside Objective C and Python, Swift will make developing iOS applications easier and quicker.

App bundles: Specifically created for developers, Apple will allow the experts to create short videos of their apps that can be viewed by App Store shoppers and let them sell groups of applications at a discount.

As a result, these wide range of new services and initiatives within iOS 8 offers better user experience. So why deny it?



Friday, October 24, 2014

What’s with the Dearth of Enterprise Apps?



Today, there’s no lack of mobile devices as such in enterprises however there is quite a shortage of apps with complete enterprise capabilities. In spite of the productivity and efficiency gains that could be realized by supporting the devices and ways of working that employee, only a few dedicated mobile apps are available for their employees.

Data is one of the most valuable assets in any organization, and mobile is simply a way to put data to use. This post hosts a few highlights like FIPS certification for government use, creating a team-focused app development server, and the incredible adoption of  iOS 7 and its enterprise-focused features.

Enterprise Mobile Apps Are Set to Explode

Did you know that only 15 % of mobile developers are targeting this audience? When employees are consistently demanding better user experiences in the tools they use for work, developers still consider quicker path to monetization, over the long run the enterprise market offers a much larger opportunity. In 2013, about 900,000 of the world’s 2.3 million mobile developers were primarily targeting the business world.

Let’s see the function of Apple Pay introduced very recently by the company. It has got many features to help companies strive to be the first to provide this functionality to their customers. With Apple Pay, it is possible to create intuitive and “surprisingly well-designed” consumer app that offers customers helpful information like transaction details and rewards points. Also, it is easier for customers to spot and address fraudulent charges, and to connect their Capital One credit cards to Apple Pay to quickly visualize purchases made in this manner.

There is more emphasis on custom mobile apps, robust enterprise app stores and app management capabilities as well as offering bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to improve customer service and general safety. The impact of mobile apps on business is as significant and fundamental as it is on consumers more secure, robust and capable of linking to back-office databases and repositories. 

Despite deploying so many potent tools, the challenges still remain.





5Types of iPhone Owners You Shall Come Across After iOS8 launch


Whenever a new iPhone launches, upgrade the existing phone to the new model has a tightly knit to hardware-and-software ecosystem, can say. Here are some thoughts about different types of buyers and whether they should get one.

With iOS8, the iPhone 6 delivers a bigger screen while remaining easy to handle catching attention of Smartphone users.

Fans

Excited about everything Apple, this group of people own every version of the iPhone. It is like they own a t shirt and most of the time they avoid washing it just because they are afraid of their logo getting faded. 

Fanboy keeps on blaming other operating systems and believes that iPhone is the best among all. Create an iphone apps and they will figure out how worth it is to have it on hand.

Desk job

These are kind of Iphone owners who keep two their Iphone as an iPod and use the former on the places like gym. Making calls doesn’t hit them but still love to keep iPhone.

The Complainers

These owners of iPhone own a device because it is trendy, and utterly they do not know much about phone and use it only as style statement or fashion. Developers, no matter how hard they try to develop an iphone app, these people keep on blaming that the size of iPhone Is difficult to handle missing their Nokia phone.

The Seniors

iPhone users who even don’t know how to get benefits out of an iPhone fall under this type. These are the set of people who can amaze at the first look whose typing speed is one word per minute and use default ring tones. Developing apps for them is a maze drive. 

The Hackers 

These ordained iphone users jailbreak their device from day one, use it to remote start their car, for calls on Skype and uses WiFi. They do nothing but winning around the device from the touch screens to censorship. 


iOS 8 is here to stay for a big margin of mobile application developments when compared to the features of a Smartphone with other early birds. 

Monday, October 20, 2014

3 Influential Ways of Casting Mobile Apps into Shopping Trends


Increased usage of the Internet and especially mobile for shopping, most often consumers interact with online coupons, and deals. A global research says about 1.2 billion of users make use of their mobile devices to access several websites, plus 15 % of online traffic is via mobile commerce which force the online shopping businesses to transform their ecommerce business to the mcommerce..


Nowadays, the mobile app developers and designers have largely contributed in mobile application development for shopping which force mobile users to stick with their devices. Add to the value, the coming of responsive web design makes website itself automatically adapt to the mobile resolutions without decreasing the quality of a website.

This article concentrates on three important factors that drive your mobile app development efforts for shopping cart development.



The biggest advantage of mobile application for shopping is that it creates a brand visibility besides which many users tend to recommend the mcommerce app if they found it valuable and useful. It is found that by 2016, more than 50% of the mobile users will prefer to complete their transactions through the m-wallet.

Mobile devices with touch-screen technology offer a rich user experience so that it impacts purchasing behaviour of the customers. Rather than customers preferring to buy from another website, a mobile app that loads faster or transaction carried swiftly in one step make you app development a grant success.

The success factor to every mcommerce completely depends on the way the mobile applications are developed. The users can evaluate the cost by comparing it with other prior to make purchase. 47% users have confessed that they surf information about the regional stores via their mobile phones before making purchase. And, 42% of users verify the inventory before ordering and 60% of customers prefer to stay at home and buy.


Summing up, the best advantage of mobile commerce is that shoppers, regardless to any geographical terms can easily complete their purchases and payment via their mobile devices safely.

Friday, October 10, 2014

5 Impressive Tools That Aide in Creating A Mobile Game App


From kids to teenagers to old grannies, who on earth doesn’t like to play mobile games? Temple run has caught most of us and candy crush has become a stress-buster, steal some hours just to play while on the break.

Creating new and unique games for all age groups, mobile apps developer have a HUGE responsibility based on the variety of OS available and, the necessary tools. This post is a house for the 5 essential mobile game app development tools to develop free version, and in some cases the paid version to enjoy some nice fun moments.


Corona

Develop a single code base using this tool and, app developers can publish the game to various platforms with high quality and high speed to keep the gamers engaged. Besides, the interface and environment used here are pretty interesting and interactive.

Unity

Known to be one of the most popular game development tools, even heavy gamers are aware of unity. Used to build games for both 2D and 3D action games, this tool allows you to develop games that can be integrated across platforms, and also extends to various gaming consoles.

ARM

This technology is one of the biggest in the world of mobile game app development available in present time in almost all the mobile app supported devices. It lets you build mobile games that possess high quality and speed, and all it needs is the openGL ES emulator to create bug-free apps.

Marmalade

Planning to create a multi platform game? Then you should necessarily choose the Marmalade SDK as your mobile game app development tool. Developers can use C++ or Xcode or even Visual Studio to build your game on various platforms like iOS, Windows, Android, and Blackberry etc.

Marmalade Juice- a cross platform development module within Marmalade offers platform specific codes and features for the major OS named above.

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine 3 source code comes with the unreal engine development kit basically integrated with middleware technologies to develop games that will work across various platforms. Whilst used to develop next gen power gaming, it is available for high end gaming consoles, and for different OS.



IOS 8 and Hybrid Mobile App to Go hand in Hand- Not Google


Built using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Hybrid apps run inside a wrapper of native code allowing installation from app stores and access to device-specific features. Google should be leading HTML5 development, but is astoundingly not working. Let’s read on to explore the depth and height of this notably changes here.

Apple though not a champion of open source or open standards, with iOS 8 it has become both. It has also introduced significant improvements for application developers who hope to exploit new API will need to work around a bug that breaks a common way for loading local files from the device.

Besides, here a few more benchmarks that sets IOS 8 a potential leader to be a huge win for hybrid apps.


HTML5 Support Level Test

The HTML5Test.com benchmark reveals that there are some APIs that are only available in WKWebView- a very supportive to iOS 8 version.

Webgl Is Now Enabled

WebGL was a hidden feature in iOS 7 but starting in iOS 8, it is officially supported in both WKWebView and UIWebView. This is huge for developers who require native-level 3D animation capability, especially for game app developers

Improvements to CSS3 Capabilities

iOS 8 has implemented many more CSS3 features than iOS 7

·         To control an element( images and videos) to fit in the parent container

·         More design support for text decoration party

·         Shaping floating content and keeping text-wrapped

Completely a Different Set of APIs

The most notable change is that WKWebView now has a mechanism to communicate between the native layer and the browser layer. For example, Cordova utilizes internal AJAX an IFRAME element to pass the data. WKWebView provides a direct way to send data between the layers. It will be much more accurate and take much less overhead compared to the UIWebView way of sending messages.


In a nutshell, all HTML5-based hybrid apps will run much quicker and become more stable for iOS devices with the new the new WKWebView engine. Playing a bigger and bigger role in application development...a lot of games and apps can be seen in future. 

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Why Small Biz are Heading to Android App Development


As Google Play is flooding bloating with millions of Android apps new ideas are flourishing in recent and futuristic contexts. There are more than 2 millions apps registered in the various market places serving a vast audience across the globe where Android OS based devices ruling in numbers and now in quality.

But this isn’t at all. Start-ups prey on Android apps for so many other reasons. Of which a few important ones are jotted down to give you a picture of why this way?

I’m an Open Source Platform

For expanding your products and services Android app development provides a wide open platform from phones and tablets to set-top boxes, refrigerator displays, and much more. This isn’t ends here. Google ensures their operating system is open to developers with the limits of Android’s capabilities, and the flexibility to cater to your needs.


I’ll Fit Your Budget

Google and the developer community has fairly streamlined the entire process making houses for varied features and functions, while custom coding and designing in order to create the app’s unique aspects. If you have a look it, the results are not only faster but affordable development cycle than most other software can offer. For startups, being short on cash is the status quo, and that’s why any business can consider it.

I Let You Dream Massive

With each release, the operating-system becomes hardly any bigger additional well-loved and extra effective which is influencing 1000s of recent customers active their products. Whilst permitting little companies to offer what their audience desire, these applications furthermore enhance the complete whole visibility of the choices.

I Promise Stable Customer Relationship

A mobile app provides accessibility to your customers instantly with no regards to time and place. With smart phones adoption is in skyrockets, developing mobile apps on Android is the most reliable and widespread methods of maintaining strong customer relations on behalf of your business.

All these above mentioned points emboldens both small and medium businesses alike to rapidly implement Android platform for acquiring their business applications developed.

Why Enterprises to Develop Cross-Platform Apps with HTML5


What do you think from a customer’s end regarding User-experience? Doubtless, there could be only one answer.  Regardless to what device they have in front of them, be it a Windows PC at work, or an Apple  iPad at the local coffee shop or an Android* phone on the go- the mobile application must work, intact.

So... why HTML5?

Instead of deluging in programming technologies such as C# and Windows APIs and Visual Studio, ObjectiveC and iOS APIs and Xcode; Java and Android APIs and Eclipse, etc cross-platform HTML5 languages focuses your efforts on the things that really matter, starting from developing the right features for your app without failing user experience.


Today’s cross-platform apps need to adapt to varying screen sizes, resolutions, aspect ratios and orientations and, yes this is both an opportunity and challenge. HTML5 code are packed and been deployed as a locally installed hybrid web app rather than running within a sandboxed browser window frame.

This article will explain the following best practices for building cross-platform HTML5 apps for enterprises:

Supportive to All the APIs Used By Your App

ü  HTML5 browser is a first-class programming language supported by some of the latest development tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio, Appcelerator Titanium and Node.js.

ü  Also, the HTML5 runtimes implemented on your target platforms will always support slightly different APIs but a nuisance for app development. However, using Cordova, you can take advantage of device capabilities to deliver rich and contextual user experiences.

Adaptive To Provide A Good User Experience

ü  Based on screen dimensions and, adjust padding around the UI components to better accommodate various aspect ratios, you can scale your UI components and fonts.

ü  Instead of loading a different image asset optimized for a different resolution, propose web standards for support of responsive images.

Managing “Quirks

The fast evolution of the HTML5 standard behaves differently as a function of the target platform, optically different in the behaviour of platform runtimes to complicate cross-platform development. Say, Android platform shows inconsistent behaviour over audio and video playback across various manufacturer implementations. Such differences can be easily overcome by the use of cross-platform JavaScript library APIs that mask runtime implementation differences such as Modernizr.

In order to serve the app developers, HTML5 technology is applied to building device applications that will help you to write once and deploy across multiple platforms.


How to Generate Revenue from a “Free” App: 4 Modest Conspiracies.



The price tag of an app often becomes a barrier for people to download it whilst acting reluctant to generate money. This is why counter intuitive that a free app became an easy mode to generate revenue.

So how do you make money from a free app?  Let’s see a few surprising strategies.

Get Users First Monetize Later

Let’s take an example to illustrate how this works. Whatsapp which was acquired by Facebook for a staggering $19 Billion, on the surface, has no revenue model which means no subscription fees or mobile ads. But see they do have a lot of users with 18 billion transactions a day. 

As simple this model is defined to be getting the users first and monetize later regardless to the data size, advertising or something else.

Act As a Vehicle To Deleiver Quality Service / Product: 

Few examples for this model will be

·         Uber, a mobile app where users can request and pay for a ride sharing service.

·         Doctors on Demand application let users to get a consultation from a licensed physician through a video conference for $40 for 15 minutes

·         Besides, there are many online shopping apps to purchase pretty much anything and everything.

Mobile Advertising Is An Aid:

Almost projected to reach $31.5 Billion this year alone, many mobile ad companies have sprouted with various revenue models most of them in conjunction with apps that have in-app purchase and consequently allows a free app to generate revenue even if the user doesn’t make any in-app purchases.

In-App Purchase Otherwise the “Freemium” Model

Whilst your users are getting purchase an app for absolute free price, they are provided with an opportunity to purchase additional services.  Not to forget, Apple retains 30% of the revenue generated from this mechanism.

·         Unlocking “Pro” Version of the App besides unlocking varied features

·         Allowing the app to work after a trial period

·         Disabling ads is currently the highest grossing app strategies.

·         Including additional content like a song, story, game level, etc

Winding up, all that i want to say is if you want to develop an app for profit- launch it “free” is the way to go.