Software Development – Life Cycle

Posted on March 31, 2023 by schatzi

We often feel that it has become so easy for us to access complicated things in just a couple of seconds. With the upcoming of online business we can process so many transactions in just a few minutes through a click of simple mouse. Sit back easily and you will find all things done without any waiting. Well! This is all because of the great master minds working day in and out to come up with the latest software technologies. Team of professionals work together as a Software development team to form different kinds of software and make things simpler for us.

Software development can be defined as a process through which a particular software product is developed. The entire process followed to come up with the desired software can also be termed as the software life cycle. There are certain basic steps that are followed for any software development and after summarizing these steps we have come up with the given below steps to make you aware about the software development process.

ANALYSIS: Analyze the software, what kind of technology is it? Is the software similar to the one before or a new application has been added to it. Look for the requirements and try to understand the concept. The scope of the software from futuristic point should also be stated and this is referred as scope document.

DESIGNING: This step looks into the architectural representation of the software. The layout of the software is well defined and this architectural representation makes sure that the software is successful in meeting requirements of product and further ensuring the futuristic requirements.

IMPLEMENTATION: This is the doing phase where talented software engineers come into the limelight. These professionals start programming the code.

TESTING: The most important phase where quality check of the software development takes place in order to ensure that the bugs are catched at the earliest and debug them.

DEPLOYMENT: Once the code is tested it is brought into use or released.

MAINTANENCE: Looking after the software is very important as sometimes unwanted issues may arise. Make sure in this phase that the software is functioning well or otherwise fix the issues or requirements.

So going through the basic model of software development [http://www.rupizmedia.com/software-development] one can make out the amount of hardwork it requires. With the growth of IT industry the niche of software development will surely touch the sky soon!

Posted in Software | Tagged | Comments Off on Software Development – Life Cycle

5 Ways to Engage on Your Social Media Profiles

Posted on March 30, 2023 by schatzi

Social media is a fantastic way of gaining traffic to a blog. If you are not currently tapping into these amazing tools, then now is the time to start!

Have you ever really considered what the power of social media can do for your business and blog? Social networking allows you to connect with others and unleash your inner expert to the world.

Are you unsure how to go about connecting on your social media profiles? Don’t worry because these 5 tips will help kick start you into the world of social media. And remember, the best way to start… is to start!

1. Be Yourself In All Your Social Media Accounts

One of the most important things to consider in your social networking is being yourself. You want people to get to know you and engage with you. If you are hiding behind some false mask then how can you expect people to connect with you.

Participate in conversations, engage with others, and encourage networking from others on your sites. This will help build credibility and trust with your readers and by doing so others will be more likely to engage with you and share your content.

2. Always Provide Value

Everything you do must be providing value to others. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking “it’s just a Facebook post”, or “what difference will this tweet make”. Every single time you connect on your social media platforms, you MUST provide value to others.

The ‘value’ does not always have to be hard and fast educating information. It could be light hearted joke or piece of inspiration, but if it is going to ‘do something’ for others, then it is giving value.

3. Always Respond To Others

Keep active on your social media profiles and respond to everyone. People will stop engaging with you if you don’t engage back, so this is crucial!

Show that you care about others and what they have to say. There is so much that can be learnt from other’s, so utilise this for your benefit.

Be SEEN in social media, and you will surely reap the rewards.

4. Respond With Your Full Attention

If people are taking the time to leave you a comment, then have the decency to respond to them. People don’t ‘have’ to engage with you. It is not a requirement that people must be active on your profiles. If therefore people are active, thank them and engage appropriately with them.

You wont always have people agree with your content, but that is OK too. Don’t merely dismiss their comment or delete it, but rather thank them for their opinion and have a conversation with them. Negative comments can sometimes be your gold nuggets for helping a post go viral. You are after interaction, and what can initially be seen as negative interaction, can be turned around for the positive.

5. Enjoy Yourself!

Participating in social media should be fun to do. The more you get into it and engage, the more fun you will have, so literally get stuck in! There is no point in thinking of social media as a chore, because this will reflect in how you treat your profiles.

There is so much to learn on social media, but the more you do it the easier it will become. The more time you spend learning how to blog, you will find that your experience and confidence grows.

If you are not already connected to social media accounts, then don’t put it off any longer. Be excited about this and people will get excited with you!

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | Comments Off on 5 Ways to Engage on Your Social Media Profiles

Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADP) Classification

Posted on March 29, 2023 by schatzi

With the phenomenal growth of mobile app adoption, enterprises are faced with challenges to develop and maintain the apps that work on all these diverse platforms and devices to reach wider audience. Developers also face the challenge of maintaining consistent look-and-feel across device/OS.

Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP), as the name suggests, provides development tools and frameworks for building Business-to-Employee (B2E) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) mobile applications. In addition to providing the tools, these platforms also provide middleware servers to connect and synchronize the data with the back end systems, eliminates the duplicate work by allowing business logic to be written and maintained in one place. You can build tighter integration with device features by using these MADP tools.

Following are the primary characteristics that any MADP tools should possess:

  • Integrated Development Environment (IDE): providing Visual Editors/Plugins, Form Builders, Property Builders, Debuggers and Source Control Integration.
  • Mobile App Development and Debugging: Explicit support for platform devices/emulators, platform specific code generations etc.
  • Multi-Device O/S support and integration: Multi-device platform support with Device Specific Code Optimization, Device Specific Runtime, Device Specific Feature integration and Tighter integration with device.
  • Packaging and Provisioning Mobile Apps: Supporting Native and Hybrid deployments, Single Build Process for all platforms, Inbuilt Application signing, Provisioning Flexibility of Single App – Single Platform, Single App – Multiple Platforms.
  • Middleware Server: Application server that hosts the back end service integration components managing the device registrations, security and transaction management. Also takes care of Mobile Resource Management based on User, Device & Network context.
  • Enterprise Application Integration: Adapters for integration with ERP/CRM and other Backend systems. Support for Data Mappers, Prebuilt Data Transformers, Data Chunking and Server Side Cache.
  • Security and Remote Management: Support for Device data encryption, disabling auto complete features, OTA based Application Management &Updates Device Capability Management (power consumption, networking).

On a broad level these MADP tools based on their development framework & packaging style can be classified into two categories

  • Native build tools and
  • Hybrid build tools

Native Build tools: This is a standard and traditional approach being following by the tool vendors who are in mobile market for long time. Products built on this approach provide sophisticated IDE tools to build application using their propriety frameworks. In this approach it is the responsibility of the tool to make the mobile application device agnostic.

Once the developer builds the mobile project in the tool and specifies the targeted platforms, it automatically creates the optimized native package for the respective platform. Platform/Device specific runtime not only takes care of UI screen optimization but also handles the memory, power &bandwidth management. These IDEs also come with platform specific property sheets for configuring features that are unique to specific platform.

Provides strong middleware features such as offline data synchronization, on device security, back end system integration, transaction management, serving the data based on user context etc.

This approach has its own share of Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  • Provides sophisticated WYSIWYG editors, using drag and drop editor, script & expression builders and property sheet features
  • Guarantees platform and device diversity
  • Good Performance, generates optimized native based on the target platform and device
  • Time to market is very less, using write once and deploy on multiple platforms

Cons:

  • Architecture is built using proprietary framework
  • Vendor lock-in
  • Requires learning a new skillset such as a new scripting language, a new IDE, etc.
  • Cost of ownership is high, license is Device/Session based and in very few cases it is CPU based

Top MDAP products that fall under this category are KonyOne, Antenna AMPchroma, Syclo etc.,

Hybrid Build tools: As the name suggests mobile apps built using these tools depend on HTML5 hybrid frameworks for building device agnostic applications. Products in this category, primarily concentrate more on providing the middleware server features that act as a gateway between the mobiles apps and backend enterprise systems. Most of these tools use REST Web services for integration with backend systems.

For building device agonistic UI, these tools depend on frameworks such as JQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, Dojo Mobile etc. Using these UI frameworks, developer has to fine tune the HTML5 & CSS in the app to render the UI specific to the platform/device. For accessing the device features such as gallery, contacts, accelerometer, camera, GPS etc. these tools depend on hybrid frameworks such as PhoneGap/Cordova.

This approach has its own share of Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  • Follows Open Standards, Architecture is built on top of open standards
  • Framework flexibility, allows developers to choose the type of UI framework tool they want to use
  • Skillset reuse, leverages existing investment done in web development skills
  • Vendor Lock-in is limited to security and synchronization features
  • Cost of Ownership is less, Licensing is liberal with the availability of open source tools

Cons:

  • Does not guarantee device diversity, developer have to depend on UI frameworks to build cross platform UI and fine tune it to specific platform/device
  • User Experience Performance lags behind the native approach, hybrid code are not generally optimized to the specific platform on which app is running
  • Time to market is more, developers need to write/tweak the code for each platform and screen resolutions

Top MDAP products that fall under this category are IBM Worklight, Convertigo, SUP, OpenMEAP etc.,

Existing middleware vendors have slowly started looking into this approach. With their current power of providing robust middleware, security and EAI features they can easily build & add Hybrid Build MADP tool into their portfolio.

Conclusion

No doubt, Native Build tools with their strong feature set have always stood on top during any MADP evaluations, but they are unable to make fast inroads into organizations due to their inflexible licensing models and high license cost. Vendor lock-in is another bottle neck that is influencing CIOs to have second thought before going ahead with Native Build MADP tools. Due to lack of standards specification (eg., JEE, JDO) in MADP space, vendors have no choice but to build tools using propriety standards. This is a high time for tool vendors to come together to define standards in this space.

On the other hand Hybrid Build tools though having inferior features than its counterpart are making inroads into the organizations due their open standard implementation that revolves around HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards. Due to their flexible licensing models and open standards, CIOs are unable to resist themselves from looking forward to buy these tools. The other main advantage of using Hybrid Build tool for CIOs is, now they can reuse their existing web development teams (with JavaScript, HTML, CSS skillset) to build mobile apps.

Posted in Mobile Apps | Tagged | Comments Off on Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADP) Classification

Brain Games To Improve Memory

Posted on March 28, 2023 by schatzi

There are a lot of games that can improve your memory. These act as cognitive exercises. The same way you feed yourself with nutritious food to have a healthy body, you also should do the same with your brain. You feed your mind with new ideas or through brain games or exercises to increase your mental capacity, thus, enhancing your memory. Games that improve memory can really be fun.

As games are getting more popular over the years, there are many varieties of to choose from and hundreds of them are free and can be accessible online. It can be for any lifestyle and any play reference. Whatever you enjoy, here are different types of games and its elements that can help improve memory.

PUZZLES

Examples of puzzle games include word games like Word Factory, Scrabble or Bookworm, in which you have to make a list of words from a bunch of letters. Another example is pattern recognition or sequence solving games where one should match items of a specific type, or finish an almost completed sequence or number grid like Sudoku. Puzzle games are just one of the many games that improve memory since it requires focus. This increases concentration and stimulates the problem-solving parts of the brain.

MATCHING

This type of game can improve memory by sharpening memory acquisition skills thereby making future memorization easier. These games that improve memory are also known as Concentration, Memory, Pairs, or Shinkei-suijaku. This is a card game in which a number of cards are face down on a table and two cards will be flipped up over every turn. The goal of the game is to successfully turn over pairs of matching cards. Playing this kind of game is a fun and effective way for children and adults to improve memory.

TRIVIA GAMES

Trivia games are some of the most enjoyable memory games you can play. This kind of game stimulates your memory by forcing to access information to all parts of your brain. A common type of trivia game is played by taking the form of a question and answer sequence. The nice thing about trivia games is you can choose any topic you like. Any game that allows you to recall information belongs to this category. Crossword puzzle is also a well-known trivia game. This is one of the best games that can improve your memory.

Playing any of these on a daily basis is a very effective way of training your brain and powering-up your memory. Varieties of these games improve memory by enhancing your cognitive functions such as problem-solving, concentration, and decision-making skills. It can also reduce your stress level. These may seem very challenging but that is exactly the point. Do not get frustrated, simply have fun.

Posted in Game | Tagged | Comments Off on Brain Games To Improve Memory