Android – A Top Pick For Mobile App Developers

Android powers millions of mobile devices in over 190 countries across the globe. Today, it's the largest installed base of any mobile platform and becoming increasingly popular everyday. There are millions of Android users who look for games and other entertainment mobile apps every day. Android gives a world-class platform to developers for creating such interesting games and apps, with the help of just a few steps.

A great development framework

Android provides you all that you need to build some of the best apps in the market. It is a single application model which allows you to deploy your mobile apps to hundreds and thousands of users worldwide – from phones to tablets. It offers you various tools that make an app look great. Android automatically adapts your user interface to make the app look wonderful on each device. For instance, you can easily create an Android app binary which is designed both for tablet and phone. You can declare your UI in sets of XML resources. One set will be the part of UI which will be common to all form factors while the other sets will be specifically optimized for tablets and phones. During runtime, Android would apply the correct resource sets that are based on density, locale, screen size and the like.

Also, the Android Developer Tools provides its developers a full Java IDE with latest functionalities for debugging, developing and effectively packaging Android apps. With the help of IDE, an Android apps developer can develop apps for any Android device.

Open marketplace for distributing Android apps

Since Google Play is an open marketplace, you can sell your apps the way you want. You can publish it whenever you want, as frequently as you want, and to the type of customers that you want. You can also monetize the way that works best for your business. You can either make it a paid app or a free one. You can include in-app subscriptions for better and higher engagement. Being an open marketplace, Android allows you to have total control over app pricing and in-app products. You can set the app price as well as change it whenever you want. This can help you get better revenues for your business.

Apart from growing your client base, Google Play also helps in increasing engagement and visibility across your Android apps. If your app rises in the popularity charts, Google Play will place the app in the weekly “top” rankings. Therefore, Google Play serves as a catalyst for the success of your business.

Advantages of developing apps for Android

Android is a world-class platform for app development, especially for the first-time developers. Android, being an open ecosystem, allows developers to access all the sections of the Android code which they might require for their app development, through Android Software Development Kit.

Not only this, Android is exclusively designed for savvy users to unlock the OS for installing new bits and pieces of unofficial software from a diverse range of locations, which is popularly known as 'rooting.'

Owing to the huge freedom afforded to the Android app developers and users, it's clearly becoming world's most preferred mobile platform.

Are you thinking of launching your Android app for your business too?

Drupal Developers Are Eagerly Waiting For The Soon To Be Released Drupal 8... And With Good Reason!

The launch of Drupal 8, the latest version of one of the most popular open-source content management systems in the world, is just around the corner. As with prior version upgrades, this time also developer communities across the globe are eagerly waiting to experience Drupal development with this new version. Indeed, this time Drupal has packed a lot of features into the CMS that are likely to make the job of web developers much easier than before. Let’s have a sneak peek into some of the most notable features of Drupal 8, shall we?

Responsive themes are going to change the way developers build websites

Responsive design is the all new way of ensuring that websites are displayed perfectly on every kind of device, from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. The text is automatically resized and the images and other multimedia elements are re-aligned according to the size of the screen, for the best browsing experience. Problem is, even if the cores of most content management systems are compatible with responsive design, the themes and extensions are usually not so. This often results in conflicts between the CMS and its themes, resulting in weird glitches in the way the website is displayed. Drupal 8 seeks to change the scenario completely, for the better. Every theme packed into this version of Drupal offer seamless support for responsive design, allowing developers to create the best browsing experience for visitors, every time. Plus, there will certainly be new ones available for download, in the months following the release.

Backward compatibility is going to make website migration quick and easy

Migrating websites coded in earlier versions of a CMS to the latest version is often a royal pain in the neck for web developers. There are tons of glitches to take care of during the process and even after that, there is no guarantee that every element is going to work properly. Drupal 8 changes the game by offering seamless support for migration of websites coded in Drupal 6 or later versions into Drupal 8. Every element of websites including themes and multimedia elements can be flawlessly ported to the new version, without any glitch. This functionality is likely to bring forth drastic reduction in the duration of Drupal development cycles.

Multilingual sites will be easier to develop than before

Drupal 8 will make developing multilingual websites easier than ever before. From inbuilt user interfaces in many different languages to software translation updates delivered by the active community of drupal developers around the world, Drupal 8 is going to make developing multilingual websites easier than ever before.

Drupal developers are eagerly waiting for the release of Drupal 8, and with good reason! A host of new features available in this version, such as support for responsive design, multilingual website development and backward compatibility with Drupal 6, are guaranteed to make the life of developers much easier.  

10 useful things about Ektron 9

“Responsive” is the recent buzzword in Web Content Management or WCM. Your site needs to be mobile-optimized in order to cater to the growing number of smartphone and tablet users who like to access information on-the-move.

If you are thinking of deploying a mobile site, you also have to take into consideration all the legacy data that needs to be ported from your existing website to the new platform. It can be a time consuming and costly affair.

Ektron, one of the oft-used WCM platforms, lets you create and publish personalized experiences by delivering websites that can adapt to the device of the user. It is an effective digital marketing tool organizations are using to increase traffic, prospective leads and final conversions.

As far as content is concerned, publishing it to the audience is no longer the primary lookout for marketers. What they are more interested in is presenting the most useful content to visitors. Relevance is key in driving customized experiences forward.

Thousands of leading portals worldwide have benefited from mobilizing Ektron CMS, and the latest version of this .NET-based web content management tool takes off from where its predecessor, version 8, left.

Why moving to Ektron 9 is a good idea

Ektron 9, which the company claims to be a significant update in a long time, is based on extensive partner feedback and brings with it many improvements. So, what are these enhancements? And most importantly, are they worth your investment? Let's find out.

1. Ektron offers more agile author solutions so that you can implement website features and make them available to your market quicker than the competition.

2. You deal with simple tools to optimize and control experience across devices, making it one of those platforms that doesn't require in-depth technical know-how.

3. Before publishing, you get to preview the content on different mobile devices. This makes it easier for you to identify, rectify and deploy with little to no technical expertise.

4. One of the main advantages of mobilizing Ektron across your enterprise is the level of control you have over what content visitors see on their devices. It reiterates the importance of presenting relevant content irrespective of the medium.

5. Context plays a key role in presenting relevant information, and Ektron 9 goes a long way in setting breakpoints in your responsive design layout and cropping images automatically for those breakpoints. You can also swap images as per the breakpoints to enhance context.

6. With the new version of Ektron, you get a redesigned UI that's convenient as well as improves productivity. Formatting content is easier than before which further helps in publishing content tailor-made for your audience.

7. Make your content richer by a simple drag-and-drop feature for adding images.

8. The quick installation and easy configuration features add to the effectiveness of mobilizing Ektron across enterprises.

9. Persona management is one of the key benefits of Ektron 9 as you can develop personas after taking into consideration the different attributes of your Marketing Automation, CRM and similar key systems.

10. The new UI also offers a revamped search functionality that speeds up the content curation process. You are able to find and filter published content faster.

iPhone App Developers are Your iPhone's Best Friend

With millions of iPhone users looking for more and more interesting and useful apps and with the growing mobile apps market, the demand for good iPhone app developers is increasing. Choosing the right developer from the huge gamut of app developers is crucial for enhancing your iPhone's iOS development. In simple words a good quality iOS will support good quality iPhone apps, hence the development of iOS is as important as the development of more and more good and useful apps. Keeping up-to-date with market trends and being ahead of your competitors is the only way to survive in the booming and fast developing mobile apps industry. The more and better the apps you provide, the better it is for your business. So, opting for the right developer and provider of apps platforms is an important decision that needs to be taken while choosing your apps development partner. It is always wise to opt for a reputed and known company over freelancers as the source should be dependable and authentic.

iOS and the iPhone apps are the real deal

The art of developing apps for an iPhone not only requires technical knowledge, but also a lot of creativity and imagination. The iOS allows and supports an endless number of applications. Users of iPhones almost live on its apps, as they are dependent on them for a number of their daily activities. Dependency on apps for accomplishing daily tasks is increasing with each passing day. iOS is considered to be the world's most advanced and progressive mobile operating system. Redefining mobile technology, the iOS gives developers the opportunity to create revolutionary and unique mobile apps. iOS gives you a powerful foundation that enhances the user experience. Added to this you have the Cocoa Touch, which is the programming model that drives user interaction on iOS and provides you with the facility of multi-touch. iOS goes on stuffing and loading you with its endless number of artifacts. Graphics attributes like fast 3D rendering, comprehensive 2D drawing, and direct access to video playback and capture are only a few of the capabilities provided by iOS among its enormous ambit of services.

Apple's App Store offers millions of iOS apps. The apps for iPhone are developed by Apple as well as by third-party developers, so you have a huge list of apps. These apps are unique and are designed and tailor-made for iPhones. Apps can be fun and extremely beneficial at the same time. Think of an app with a location-based feature that informs your customers on the offers and deals you are providing at a point of time when they are somewhere close to your shop. Now, if you are an event manager, wouldn't it be great if there was an app that would take care of all your event management needs? It definitely would be of great help to have apps like these. So, apps can really benefit your business in many ways than one.

Hence, constant iOS development to be able to support more and more apps is essential for keeping the world of apps alive and kicking. So, get in touch with acknowledged iPhone app developers and see how your business flourishes in no time.  

2 Major Reasons to Upgrade to Ektron 9 Now!

Ever since Ektron 9 was launched, developers across the globe have been going gaga over the plethora of features this version offers. Minor improvements in most aspects of the content management system have been made as expected, but the most important factor that sets this version apart from all its predecessors is the seamless support for mobile websites. Designing a mobile site using previous versions of the famous CMS was unfortunately quite difficult. This version tries to remedy all that, along with offering enough extra functionalities and improvements to existing ones to become a mobile web developer’s asset. Let’s take a look at the most notable features of this version, shall we?

Ektron PageBuilder has been redesigned from the ground up

The PageBuilder of Ektron 9 sports an all-new, user-friendly editing interface. The interface is finger-friendly, allowing you to build sites for mobile devices and test them out for compatibility with a wide range of mobile devices. So, next time you are developing a website and don’t have an iPad lying around to test the site compatibility, you need not worry. The CMS offers a built-in feature to help you take care of all the testing you would ever need to do for your site. Web designers specializing in Ektron development will also get to code in HTML5, the latest iteration of the most commonly used markup language. This also has a downside, though. Websites developed using Ektron 9 do not support IE8, Chrome 3 or Firefox 3 and earlier versions. Apart from that, the Page Builder also offers the following features, which will delight web developers :

1. Seamless compatibility with existing widgets and wireframes.
2. Client-side framework, which means most of the processing will be done on the client’s device, keeping server resources free for other purposes.
3. Better support for jQuery, and test page for the same.

Ektron 9 supports fully responsive design of websites

Responsive design is the best way of developing websites that will likely be accessed from multiple types of devices. Let us imagine you wish to ensure your website can be browsed using an iPhone, an Android phone, an iPad and a digital TV. How will you ensure that the site looks great on all these devices, other than designing a different website for each? With complete support for responsive design, Ektron 9 allows you to design websites that automatically scale up or down according to the screen size of the device being sued to view the site. Multimedia elements like images are also automatically resized, thanks to the Adaptive Image Resizing technology used in the CMS.

Ektron has been the favorite CMS for countless multinational companies for many years now. With the new version, which retains and improves upon all the essential features that made this CMS popular across the globe, Ektron has broken new grounds in ensuring user-friendliness, both for coders and end users. And let’s not forget mobilizing Ektron is pretty much child’s play for developers who have used the previous versions. If you haven’t upgraded to this version of yet, now would be a very good time to start.

Why Drupal CMS is A “Smart Choice” For Your Website

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a content management system and web application development framework that is trusted by numerous businesses, non-profits, government organizations, and individuals globally for creating and managing personal websites, blogs, eCommerce websites, intranets, and many more. This content management system is widely popular because it provides powerful, low cost, scalable, and high value solutions to manage websites and blogs. It is also an open source platform, which means the code of this CMS is freely available to anyone to modify and use. So you don't need to worry about license fees and vendor issues. Drupal is being constantly modified and upgraded by a passionate community of thousands of global developers working continuously to increase the functionality and security of this CMS. What does this mean for you? A community so big and widely available means that you will never get stuck if you encounter an issue with your website or blog. Even if you web development team is not available at the moment you encounter an issue, you can easily reach the global Drupal developers and have free access to all upgrades and security enhancements. Let's take a look at some other benefits of Drupal development:

Why Drupal?

Simple and flexible: With this content management system, you can build an attractive website or blog from scratch without any hassle. Operating this CMS is simple and straight-forward because it requires less programming than the other content management systems available, Moreover, you can add new features to your website on your own even if you do not know much about HTML language. With Drupal, you don't need to change the entire site to add something simple. You just make the change, it's that simple.

Reliable and efficient: Drupal is renowned for its meticulously crafted codes. This means, that websites that are developed with this CMS will not experience speed issues and concurrence problems in the long run. Moreover, updating a site and blog with fresh content is very important for any business out there. Drupal makes it easy for users to update their sites from any ordinary web browser. You can also categorize the content of your website through URL addresses, paths, and your own lists. This makes it easy for the admins to manage, search, and reuse the content in a hassle-free way.

Constant support: You can add great modules and features to your websites and customize it based on your business needs quite easily with Drupal. Hiring a web development team every time you want to update the content of your site or change something on it, can be difficult and expensive. Using Drupal CMS is the easiest way to avoid such hassles and manage a website without having a degree in computer engineering.

These are some of the major reasons that has led many big names like The White House, MTV UK, NASA, The Economist, Warner Brother Records, New York Observer, The Pulitzer Prizes, Fast Company and many others to build their websites with Drupal development. A lot of big and small companies have realized the fact that Drupal CMS is the best option for their websites – not only from a development approach, but also it increases your ROI.

KitKat 4.4 brings good news for Android app developers

The 4.4 KitKat version of the mobile OS and the Google Nexus 5 are two of the biggest Android developments which can disrupt the mobile industry going into 2014. KitKat was in the pipeline and people were waiting for Google to make it official along with the company's latest mobile device, the Nexus 5. After months of unconfirmed image and specification leaks, speculations and debates, Google's premium smartphone is finally available to order on Google Play.

According to Sundar Pichai, senior vice president, Android, Chrome and Google Apps, the new operating system has been redesigned making it not only compatible with a range of smartphones in 2014 but also phones with last year's specifications. This is great news for Android app developers as the new OS opens up the market even further, by including lower to mid-range phones that don't ship with a lot of RAM. Google says the minimum RAM requirement for KitKat OS to run smoothly on mobiles is a modest 512 MB.

What to expect?

Google's mobile OS and its different versions power numerous devices. With KitKat, the company wants to unify all of its software under a common umbrella. It foresees the next billion people going mobile with a single OS – KitKat 4.4. Till now, these different iterations posed a challenge to publishers of fun, hip mobile apps who weren't able to design programs that would work on all devices. Users stuck with older versions of the OS were not able to get access to improvements or upgrades each succeeding version had to offer.

This latest Android development will surely be appreciated by millions of users in developing markets and around the world as the changes in the new OS enable it to work with limited memory capacity smartphones in the entry level price bracket. Pichai also remarked that Google is looking to take the same Android version and make it compatible with all existing and future versions (till atleast 2014) of mobile devices. The whole idea behind this new release is to prevent fragmentation of the multiple versions of the OS and bring them all together.

New revenue source for developers

The good news for Android app developers has to be the fact that Google has already released KitKat to handset makers. It means they can start building their smartphones based on the new software, with developers getting more monetization opportunities from apps that can run on both past and upcoming handsets. KitKat has quite a few improvements up its sleeve, especially the user interface, which is now richer and more intuitive. The OS anticipates what a user wants to see before being asked, like when you are near a movie theater, it displays show times.

Google went with LG again this time to design its latest smartphone. The South Korean consumer electronics company had partnered with Google last year to manufacture the Nexus 4. Back then, Google introduced their Jelly Bean 4.1 OS running on the phone, and though the device had a lot going for it, erratic supply chains prevented it from becoming a phenomenon like other flagships, namely the Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4. But that was last year, and this time around, we hope both Google and LG to get their acts together.