The mobile app development landscape seems to bloom incredibly in the past few years and will continue its growth even in 2018. The app development industry encloses billions of smartphones, millions of app developers and also giant and popular brands like Apple, Microsoft, Google that drive the industry. With Android and iOS ruling the mobile app industry, it is very interesting to know that though Android has more apps on its store and the highest smartphones sold, iOS makes more money from its business.

Last year has been really great for iOS with Apple launching two new iPhone devices: iPhone 8 and iPhone X in the market. The company also came up with major updates on iOS 11 and with the latest trends affecting the platform, developers too are tuning their projects and turning to iOS mobile app development.

Here is what they are implementing in their application to secure their position in the competitive market.

Using artificial intelligence for Siri:

The latest Apple’s creation Siri is an intelligent, personal assistance that can be more enhanced now with artificial intelligence. iOS app developers are now implementing AI with Siri, so that it can better understand what you speak and want.  It can now act like a task manager of sorts and perform as the medium for the users to command various Apple services and gather information and content from them.

Swift4

Swift is a general purpose programming language, which is innovated by Apple for tvOS, MacOS, iOS. Creating apps using Swift is easy and fun as the syntax is very concise and expressive and it supports almost all the platforms and Linux as well. Swift4 is a more advanced version of its previous releases and the iOS developers can now create apps faster without compromising on the features and security. Since the apps developed using Swift4 consumes less memory devices, it is faster and safer.

More focus on WatchOS:

With smartphone ruling the market for a long period of time, wearables are gaining attention among the consumers. iOS developers are now focusing more on WatchOS since Apple launched it in the last quarter of 2017. Developers are now creating more responsive and higher quality watch application this year because such applications have become a huge hit in the health and navigation domain.

Core Machine Language:

The Core Machine Language has been introduced by Apple and iOS developers are already using it in various products like QuickType, Camera, Siri and etc. The developers are now exploring how they can use the ML capabilities in their iOS apps. With the Core ML Libraries and computer vision techniques, developers can create apps to detect faces, develop games and create smarter and interactive apps in the coming years.

File management: 

The latest version of iOS has come up with several new features and have already created excitement among the developers. One such feature is the file management that allows the app users to effectively manage cloud from a single location. You may have various documents or presentation of GDriven, personal videos and images on Dropbox and with File apps you can now easily create a single dashboard and gain access and handle all the apps from a central location.

Thus, to stay ahead in the competitive market, iOS developers are utilizing the latest features and trends to execute your app idea and create solutions that can definitely shape the growth of your business in the coming years.

With the development of the technology, internet has pervaded much beyond any language barriers and most websites today, focus on offering international audiences with their multilingual solutions. Creating a multilingual site can be a difficult task as there are various techniques for doing so. Whether you need to translate the training material of your site or make your company more accessible to the potential customers all over the globe or have plans to launch a product in the international market, you have to be sure that you are getting good returns of your investment and that your multilingual website meets quality standards.

If you don’t have any knowledge about how to start developing your multilingual website, then here I will share with you some important questions that you need to ask before starting your project.

Today, more business organizations clearly understand that a multilingual web presence helps to create a positive effect on conversion, long term branding, generate direct revenue and much more. Here is what you should consider before delving deep into your new website translation project.

Why do you need to localize your website?

Before generating more details of how, when and who, it is vital to clear on why you need to localize your site. so what is your goal? Do you want to increase your revenue in a short term or are you willing to create your local web presence to build your brand and create a long term presence? Understanding your business’s needs is the first and foremost step to form a goal oriented plan and also to measure the success of your efforts in the coming future.

What are your short and long term business objectives?

Once you have identified the purpose of creating a multilingual website, the next step is to define your benchmarks for the success. If one of your business objective is to increase the conversion rate, then the next step should be to improve it to a higher percent. Clearly understand your objectives and metrics to measure if you are willing to build your brand image. Once you have identified the current baselines and future objectives, then building the internal business case for your website will become easier.

When is the right time to launch your multilingual website?

The cost, time and quality is a triangle that is equally relevant to multilingual website as it is to any other project. Automation and technology can speed up the translation process, but it is important to consider the implementation processes in the overall schedule. Before you fix on the date when your local sites will be launched, get in touch with an experienced language service provider to understand the process, resources, infrastructure to create a balanced plan to meet your deadlines.

With whom should your work to create the most cost effective and time efficient process?

How can you localize your web content today? Do you have an internal translating team who can directly work into your CMS or do you have to hire a language service provider?  In case you have to outsource, then choosing the right company is very important. Keeping in mind the desired timeline, you can scale your translation team up to speed turnarounds. And in case, if you find it tough to manage the changes within your organization, then hiring an expert language service provider can save both time and money.

Which solution will work best for you?

While creating a multilingual website, you have to consider three most important parts that include, infrastructure, resources and the process. The infrastructure can be managed in a variety of ways like using an enterprise level translation management system with your CMS, a proxy solution where you need to take care of your master language content, and a solution by using the combination of both. The process will be based on your objectives, goals, available resources and also the infrastructure. And your resources will depend on your process and infrastructure that you use.

Thus, whenever you plan to create a multilingual website, keep in mind the above questions so as to successfully reach your goals within the specific time and budget.

When users ask for new features, application developers have to face the challenge of adding more codes to it so that their software can offer even more. So if the software is used by the consumers, it will inevitably need to be changed. But in most cases a software isn’t written in the way that makes it very easy to modify. So, when any changes are demanded, changing it often turns out to be the most difficult and expensive task and adding new features also becomes difficult. The cost often becomes more than twice as much to make even minor enhancements to the system that it took to develop the system initially.

To avoid this situation, it is important to write changeable codes that help to add features without causing the other parts of the system to break. With changeable codes, it is really cost effective to add features in the future. Though writing changeable code doesn’t take a very long time, but it is very important to pay great attention to certain things while developing them. The first and foremost thing is to make sure that they are understandable and does not contain any bugs or errors.  The importance of code testing is crucial as automated tests help to validate that the codes work as expected.

Practicing test driven development:

While writing changeable codes, the one thing that is mostly overlooked is having a good suite of unit tests to support the codes. Unfortunately, most developers practice test driven development and write the unit tests in such a way that the features are often intermingled with other codes, making it very difficult for independent software testing.

How to prevent errors?

Testing all the features while writing the codes of a system when changes are made is a must. But here a manual testing often becomes very expensive and is usually implemented until the end of a project’s lifecycle. So, adopting automated testing that can be done continuously helps to quickly identify the hidden dependencies that can be resolved as soon as they are discovered. With test driven development, we can also write tests against the behavior instead of the way we implement the behaviors. The unit tests should treat the behaviors as a black box. This gives us freedom to change our code and implement features without breaking the tests as long as the behaviors don’t themselves change. When unit testing and TDD is used to specify behaviors, they come in the form of documents and this reduces the need of creating internal documents.

A good software testing is not only about solving the errors effectively, but also about its maintainability, performance, durability and architecture. Testing your codes help you to slow down and think and indicate how it can be further improved. TDD helps to optimize your software codes even before you start to create them.

Though writing tests for your codes may take up more than half of your time, but soon it becomes a second nature. Since you are writing codes for a long term and the application will grow, the efforts pay off and it saves both your time and money. Testing your codes thus ensures that no products or applications are released with significant defects in them.

Your website is the lifeblood of your business and it needs to meet varied requirements. The marketing department always wants something that can help the customers remain engaged with informative content so that it entices them to make a purchase from the site. As brands launch their websites or blog, they are often in a fix deciding between which open source CMS would be best for them. The IT department always wants an application that is easy to maintain and update and also is less susceptible to hacking or any security threats. And with limited budgets and time before making the site live, business owners always look for something that is free of cost.

What do you mean by open source software?

Open source software is a software that has source codes that can be inspected by anyone, modified and even enhanced. The source code of any software is something that the users don’t see, but it is important for computer programmers as they can manipulate it to make essential changes and add new features and functionalities. Programmers having access to the source code can always improve the program by adding features to it and also fix any areas that are not working properly.

Is an open source CMS best to expand business culture?

The best solution for a web administrator willing to modernize the web application on a regular basis is the CMS. It is really tough to manage routine changes in the content for the developer repeatedly and the editors and marketing professionals also have to maintain a dependency on the technical staff. Choosing a CMS that fits your requirements and business goals is very important as it is a reliable means to update your web content on a regular basis without keeping any dependency on the IT department. It is recommended that one should always choose a CMS only after considering the features.

What are the prime open source CMS platforms available before you?

With hundreds of different CMS to choose from, there are mainly four open source software platforms, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento that marketers prefer to use. The systems have similarities, but each one differs to meet the specific needs of various companies and industries.

WordPress: The most popular CMS for Startups:

WordPress CMS was launched keeping in mind the concept of blogging and posting articles on the website. But after its immense success and popularity among the business owners, developers found that it is the best open source CMS and started enhancing it even more. Today, numerous entrepreneurs having issues related to site management often choose WordPress as their first alternative as it has been modernized with thousands of extensions and plugins that can accommodate any business needs. It is an open source platform, which means it is free of charges and is the most SEO friendly CMS platform and offers high flexibility for customization. Any user can start to manage the web pages without having the knowledge of HTML.

Joomla: Caters to varied industry verticals:

A popular open source CMS, Joomla is considered to be the most popular platform that is extensively used in different industries like education, hospitality, healthcare, non-profit organizations and etc. Since the Joomla package contains various parts, it allows easy modular extensions and also integrations. This makes websites very easy to build, manage and edit the website. Most of the social community web apps are designed in Joomla and perform well. Joomla CMS is best for social networking sites and e-commerce sites, but it requires basic technical skills to understand and implement it. Highly complex sites that need greater customization and personalization use Joomla development services. It is SEO friendly, offers multilingual support and also has a huge library of extensions.

Drupal:  Suits the retail marketers

Both large scale and small scale retailers prefer to use Drupal CMS system in their web app to avail better business growth. If one has some technical knowledge and can manage it, then Drupal is the best choice. It is also good for developers to build the best and feature rich CMS for small business website, but at times it may be tough for the website owners to handle.

With lots of plugins and extensions available for easy customization, which makes the website very functional, Drupal CMS is SEO friendly and is frequently updated which makes it easy to handle thousands of web content pages with great ease. Using Drupal at the starting point is a great idea because the basic CMS functionality also includes thousands of development hours and many years of user testing. Drupal offers an extensive API support with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and etc.

Magento: The best ecommerce CMS:

Magento CMS is considered to be another emerging eCommerce script that is an open source software. It uses MySQL and Zend PHP database and is a great platform for business owners who want to create e-commerce web application. It is easily possible to supercharge the codes in Magento and gear up the ecommerce website with the latest features and desired functionalities by using the extensions and plugins. It is a very reliable platform for managing web pages and regular updates by an administrator. As compared to other platforms, Magento is the best one when it comes to e-commerce and also allows the business owners to create multiple online stores. It is easy to integrate with any third party sites and offers built in SEO features.

Choosing the right CMS platform can help your company to attain success and on the other hand an unsuitable CMS platform can often lead to countless challenges for your development team. It is important to understand clearly the needs of your business and then opt for the right CMS, so that you do not regret your decision later.

One of the best things about Moodle LMS is that it is an open source framework and offers great ability to customize the online courses according to the exact specifications. This is possible because of hundreds of custom third party Moodle plugins or extensions that are offered by Moodle LMS contributors. These plugins can easily be installed and helps to change the look and feel of the application and also adds in functionalities to suit personal learning requirements.

Here in this blog, I will share with you how you can easily streamline your online training course without having to face great operational challenges. Build on the principles of creating an environment where the teachers and students can coordinate easily by availing fully flexible solutions, Moodle helps to empower both the students and the instructors.

BigBlueButtonBN: Adding a conferencing facility

This plugin helps to integrate the BigBlueButton with Moodle and it is an open source offering distance web conferencing facility. The plugin helps to provide real time sharing of various presentations and videos across the internet and also records contents. It offers features like student access restriction, defining session opening and closing dates displayed on the Moodle’s calendar and creation of activity links within the video feed courses.

Configurable Reports for creating custom reports:

• The course reports offer information about the various courses that the organization provides.
• The user reports contain information about all the users who will handle the course and their role in the training work.
• Timeline reports are used to embed category and course reports that are generally displayed in a timeline format.
• The categories report offers information about the varied course categories that can be used to embed course reports too.

Attendance:  This is another most important plugin that helps to manage the attendance for every course that is used for live sessions. The grade that the student will receive is the attendance grade and after the sessions are over, then the users are marked as having completed their course. The course becomes visible on the user’s transcript and the attendance data is then used in the executive reports. This module has another part called the Auto Attendance where the users can log their attendance and mark it instead of the teacher.

Certificate: Creating customized certificates helps you to create certificates that are based on your needs and specifications of your course. It allows you to change the font display color palette and also the language of the certificate very easily. If in case, you know coding, then you can easily alter the certificate images or logos that will appear on the certificate and create anything that is a fully customized one.

How can you customize your Moodle mobile app?

Hiring a Moodle mobile app development company is the best choice before you if you are unsure how to access the administration settings.  Any customizations can be done from the administration settings that will be applied to the mobile app that connects to your Moodle website. From the administration settings you can choose the Moodle mobile additional features to enhance your application.

If, in case you are willing to ensure that the appearance of your Moodle mobile app matches the web version of your site, then choose a specific Moodle theme to your custom styles for your site.

Another important capability to ensure that you can customized the app according to your specifications is to disable any feature in your Moodle Mobile App and add new menu items that you would like to be shown in your application. Not only this, you can also customize the language strings to make your learners, students and teachers understand something that they are more familiar with.

Moodle is one of the best LMS platforms and offers great flexibility with great plugins and extensions. A careful selection offers the best services to both the educators and the students.