Friday, 31 October 2014

Why Mobile Health Apps Sometimes Go Against the Grain


Gaming apps is becoming more and more creative in engaging with its audience, even the normal healthcare apps. The possibilities of such apps only seem to exponentially increase the more they’re put to use aiding patient recovery, promoting healthy lifestyles and complementing medical training.

However, some technical and non-technical issues are unique in mobile application development that healthcare organizations should consider outside the realm of patient therapy:


The App Development Is Misguided

Besides the elegant appeal of a health app, if it fails to address a specific problem, it is neither considered useful and subsequently not adhered to. If it simply monitors a physiologic parameter, a person’s mood/ collect data because an app is able to do so is a recipe for failure.

Whether be a patient or clinician, data must be collected only to translate a message to the end-user.

Under Evaluating Usability of Medical App

Developing an app must include an in-depth consideration of user experience without which absolute efficiency and satisfaction cannot be achieved in a particular environment.

So, what goes into making an extraordinary medical healthcare app? Yes, app design and user experience.

No Strategy to Healthcare Landscape

Let’s address a few questions here.

* What technologies are available to address your app’s goal?

* How can you improve or add to them?

* Can the technology be used by multiple stakeholders?

* Is my technology more valuable when incorporated into another offering (partnering with another technology)?

Not Building To Regulatory Specifications

No matter how many wow factor an app comprise, unless it meets regulatory requirements, new proposed regulations regarding handling of data from apps might affect development- the final standards are forthcoming.

Allude To The Lack Of Clinician Involvement

The lack of clinician input in the development of many technologies many processes need to be changed. Starting from personal schedule to instituting hospital case managers who advise patients on mobile apps, the connectivity of mHealth tools will be an important aspect of meaningful use adoption.

Selling an app does not translate to adoption but only a good app does!

5 Categories Of Gaming Apps to Impact the Healthcare Industry


Gaming apps are already aiding patient recovery, promoting healthy lifestyles and complementing medical training. Why not utilize gaming apps to engage with patients, stakeholders, donors and benefactors?

What categories of gaming apps stand bespoken in healthcare organizations to consider outside the realm of patient therapy? Let’s see.

5 Categories of Gamification for the Healthcare Industry:

Cognitive and Emotional Health: This increases brain’s health and memory, especially for persons with learning disabilities and mental disorders.

Participatory Health: Patients who make them more active through fun and interactive sessions help patients keep a track of their medication schedule and other treatment programs. Being very interactive, such apps allow them to enjoy an engaging experience, all the while learning about the value of the service offers.

Active Gaming and Fitness: How many times have you found yourself sitting in a waiting room, bored out of your mind? Whether active or motion gaming, the games apps development depends on technology that tracks body movement and reaction for a variety of disabilities.

Rehabilitation Games: Generally used for physical therapy, occupational therapy and rehabilitation programs, apps like Florida Southern helps to recovering from surgery or injury. Whilst this allows for continuous engagement between you and your patients, patients can stay active in the pursuit of improving their own health. Mental health games (e.g. Fit Brains) are designed to improve cognitive abilities and smoking cessation games help smokers quit in an entertaining way.

Medical Training: Aside from focusing patient health, this category app belongs to the doctors to achieve benefits in varied ways like: training, educational, also known as serious games help doctors in their professional training and surgical education.

Large corporations such as Nintendo currently dominate the Games for Health market. What other suggestions do you have for using gaming apps within the healthcare industry

4 Intrusive Ways Mobile Apps Impact Travel Industry Right Now

Whether it is financial services/banking, gaming, travel/tourism to even entertainment all industries are being substantially impacted by mobile technologies now. Nevertheless, the mobile app versions are growing by a significant percentage of users, all over USA.

But are all businesses giving travellers access to the mobile apps and services effectively? Or perhaps are they missing any opportunities? Here, we have compiled 5 beautiful ways mobile apps impact travel industry right now.

Banking On Enhanced Reality to Enrich Visits

Whilst enriching the visitor experience with contextual information, tourist information offices can bank on enhanced reality to enrich visits by displaying information on historical buildings and places of interest of a town or a region.

Say for instance, developing an iphone app for travellers to learn more about the history of the city of London with StreetMuseum or fast-forward to the future as in Rotterdam.

Community Travel Apps to Learn Good Deals

Price comparison websites have revolutionised the pricing policies of tour operators and lets tourists plan their holidays, accordingly. Creating community apps make it possible to exchange information and good deals besides offering conventional online auction. These kinds of apps comprise photos, videos and social networks using geo-location to share views and comments on the quality of hotels, restaurants and tourism services in real time.

Digital Tour Guides

Alongside, offering locals and tourists accurate geo-positioning of everything, depending on the time of day and GPS location- users will be informed of the nearest sites or activities. These digital tour guides allows vivid monitoring of social networks like Facebook or Twitter and respond to visitors when they mention the area’s tourism facilities.

Make Quick Bookings from Anywhere, anytime

Whether to buying a plane ticket (37%), or renting accommodation (28%) or booking a package holiday (23%), mobile apps development services can develop apps that provide roadmaps to travel to the airport, information on connecting flights (boarding gate and time), navigations within the airport terminal or even instant information service for lost baggage.


Get smarter now because your business operates within a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace!


Thursday, 30 October 2014

What Kind of Apps can Meet Enterprise Financial Management Needs



In the last few years, the growth rate of mobile applications has only been increasing so far while the devices are flying off the shelves. With encouraging BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the modern mobile device user is almost thrilled to bits thriving their apps would function better and run on a high productivity margin.

Almost every industry has been influenced, and the financial management industry is no exception.

Check out these financial management mobile apps developed for enterprises:

Chargify

Chargify is developed for customer-centric businesses, especially for those who have an online subscription feature in their businesses. In order to track orders/ special offers or discount coupons/ or even expiration dates- this app is of great use.

Expensify

Expensify app allows employees to create expense reports directly from bills that can be scanned by a phone with generating an automatic report. Besides, it is possible to sync it with your credit card or bank account to have your expenses registered automatically. Integrated with Intuit QuickBooks, it comes free for creating and submitting reports.

Intuit QuickBooks

Best suited for small businesses, this is an accounting app that allows users to track income sales and expenses, manage payroll, pay bills, create invoices and forms, and accept credit and debit card payments. It syncs data automatically across your desktop, phone, or even tablet which is a plus. Also, this software allows integration with thousands of other business apps and add-ins.

In addition to the apps mentioned above, there is one more category:

Custom Apps Development

Perhaps, if an enterprise required financial app with specific features, custom apps will be needed in order to enhance processes and meet specific business objectives 100%. But however, choosing the right mobile app development partner to develop and design a custom mobile app that will fit the company’s specific needs is a challenge.



Tuesday, 28 October 2014

What makes an Android App Perfect for Businesses


Ever since it came into existence, it is no doubt that the Android OS has revolutionized the Smartphone market- more affordable and appealing to the common men. Android App development has taken huge leaps in the apps programming arena and today there are thousands of companies who are in the business fizzle tasting success.

Ideally, the cruel reality of application to succeed in the market and gallop over competition is not just one or two but totally 10 ingredients. Let us examine each one specifically.


10 Prominent Ingredients For The Perfect Android App

Idea: Yes, unless, an app is unique and well executed, never go into the process of mobile application development to experiment with.

Expert Programmers and Software Tools: the next step is to deploy hand full of the best resources to develop the app and testing it in all possible scenarios before releasing it in the app market.

Offer A Free Version: 90% of people never opt for a newly releases premium app. Instead, offer a free version that is either ad-supported or a trial version with many convincing features.

Maintain an Ad-Free version: This works when users find your app so perfect to use from its free version that is ad-supported and are ready to invest in the premium Ad-Free version.

Consistency: This issue is plaguing a number of mobile apps today. Ensure that no freezes or crashes occur in the app once it reaches the hands of users.

Functionality: Rather than creating an app for doing 10 mediocre things, designing an app that is great in looks and solid in performance.

Navigation and Usability: Besides having a great design, navigating through the various sections of the app should not become a tedious job for the end user.

Apps Development Platform: Whilst leading OS App stores such as that of iOS, Android, Windows 8, etc are prevailing make sure your app has cross platform compatibility and that too consistently.

Be a marketing boon: Proper promotion of your app, say a witty tagline and an imposing icon should be envisaged in order to help it reach out to the masses.

So, a clear walk through of all these above mentioned ingredients is fairly presumable that you will not make mistakes with your app development strategies down the line.

Designing a Mobile App? Stay Away From These Irrevocable Mistakes


Have you ever thought of why you wanted to build a mobile app? Well, yes, you guessed it right! It is the experience that not only ensures that a business remains lucrative and highly efficient but stands to be a vital component to increase exposure. Howbeit, there are several major components that distinguish successful apps from the unsuccessful ones.

Here we have compiled a list of mistakes you can avoid while designing mobile apps to help you reap good benefits.

No Logical Set of Steps to Use the App

If you offer a logical set of steps for users to accomplish what they want to, the number of abandonments can be decreased eventually meanwhile the proportion of new users who become active ones will be much higher than otherwise.

Not offering the perfect Visual Clues

Visual clues are the base to help one understand the action that you need to take to use an object even before you actually start using it. The app designers will have to be even more careful about providing the appropriate ones.

A few design-related principles that you should follow includes:

* Choosing allowable interactions and user interface controls

* Conducting the metaphor usability to confirm that users understand the terms you use

* Best to use graphics along with text to help interpretation

Skimming on User Experience

It is better to introduce an immediate “wow” factor upon the user launching the app. With its elegant product design and user experience, even a toddler would be able to know how to use it right away. Plus, you can make it smoother removing routine sign-in out of the way and by providing fast log-ins through social media ids.

Tend To Pack Apps with Too Many Features

The most successful apps are those which concentrate only on a few things instead of emphasizing on hard editing and re-editing of your app. focus on a few prime features and spend resources and time on developing those mediocre features.

Keep in mind and manage to avoid a few mistakes that have been detailed above as there are plenty of opportunities to capitalize upon in the field of mobile app development down the line.

Monday, 27 October 2014

Top 4 Prophesies for Mobile Apps Development in 2015



The majority of enterprises need to better plan on how to get the most out of mobility investments- given the constraints of IT infrastructures. According to a joint study by OpenMarket and Forrester Consulting, the IDC forecast underscores how fast the connected device market is moving from a customer interaction standpoint as in like improving customer satisfaction (30%) and acquiring new customers (35%).

With 43% of IT ability have concern to keep up with the rapid pace of mobile customer requirements here are a few predictions we have for 2015 in the ever changing app market.

1. Revenue To reach $100Billion: When compared the number of features an app should have, -prices manifested for quality app development will be truly higher. In other words, if anybody looking to develop an app that wins the heart of users, to invest some bigger amount for such app projects is the great idea.

2. Gamification Stands Out To Be The Primary Mechanism: Almost 40% of the Global 1000 organizations will go for games app development to transform business operations addressing to more engagement with feedbacks, transparency, and connecting employees’ actions to business outcomes.

Gartner predicts that the worldwide market will grow to $2.8 billion in 2016 with enterprise gamification eclipsing consumer gamification.

3. Advanced Mobile User Experience Design: A variety of new techniques and methodologies such as motivational design, “quiet” design and “playful” interfaces help in delivering mobile apps with exceptional user experiences. Designers are also creating apps that can accommodate mobile challenges such as partial user attention and interruption with novel features such as augmented reality to meet the growing user expectations.

4. Frequent Mobile App Communication: Mobile app developers will need to find the right balance when it comes to communication. Regardless to the audience count, an app should deliver the message to each and everyone to find out what works for them and what doesn’t. Push notifications are a great way to communicate with users and we expect to see more of this.


As a whole thing, it’s easy to imagine a day when innovative apps built into cars that drive themselves and can even embrace distracted driving- more surprises on the way!

Thursday, 23 October 2014

How can mhealth Change the Health Care Service Delivery Paradigm?


The advert of mobility in health and fitness has fundamentally changed the patient to patient and patient to provider communications relationship for the healthcare industry. Represented an integrated system of health care, sometimes it breaks down barriers and the stigma associated with seeking out health services.

Mobile health is innovative because it changes the health care service in 360 degree, I would say. Besides, new mobile applications help clinicians in new initiatives to give millions of Americans access to their medical records online, keep a closer eye on patients' progress in things like diet and exercise, and nudging them to take action.

Here Are Present Five Of Those Insights 

1. More than 75 % of respondent like to use digital healthcare services as long as these meet their needs and provide the level of quality they expect. This assures digital channels like iPhone/ Android apps related to healthcare will embed in a well-thought-through multichannel concept.

2. Older patients prefer traditional digital channels such as websites and e-mail while younger patients are open to newer channels such as social media. Either to know more about services for acute and chronic conditions or to access to health-promotion and prevention services, mobile application development can be of great help.

3. There is certainly demand for mobile healthcare application that focus on prenatal health or those that could be classified as lifestyle app.

4. Efficiency, Accessibility and integration with other channels and highly innovative services are taken into account when designing digital-service offerings.

5. Regardless to the field, our generation believe in a comprehensive platform with offerings along the entire spectrum of customer services. In healthcare, patients most often cite “finding and scheduling physician appointments” as the most needed service. They do not require massive IT investments to get started.


As a whole thing, the healthcare industry is on the cusp of a third wave of IT adoption and therefore understanding the needs of patients can help pave the way.

Android 5.0 is official: the Top 5 Highlights of the Google’s Newest Version



Bended with a raft of new changes, the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop designed to be flexible to work on all the mobile devices and can be customized to fit the way you wish. It also gives developers the ability to create apps for screens of all sizes regardless to the device.

Here are a number of new features for visuals, user interfaces, web design, multi-tasking menu etc.

The New Material Design

Yes, of course it’s flat but it's heavily based on making every animation, ripples, and shadow look real which is something that most brands are shying away from and most importantly allows access for developers to use this for themselves on their apps. The idea is, no matter what device you're on, Android looks and bring consistency to the app world.

Notifications on Android L Are Getting an Overhaul

The notification panel is being merged with the lock screen and a simple swipe up takes you into the phone. Android 5.0 help users view and respond to messages directly from the lock screen. And, with Lollipop, the best part is incoming phone calls won't interrupt what you're watching or playing.

Security

Comes with “Factory Reset Protection” which is turned on to help protect data on lost or stolen devices Android Lollipop devices will come with encryption automatically. If the user wishes to activate this feature, they will be required to enter their Google login to factory reset the device and will work only when the phone pass code is enabled.

Interlocking apps

Google wants your apps to be able to talk to one another as in like to search for a place only to have it served up in Google Earth.

Music and Communication Applications 

This new Android 5.0 Lollipop has bolder graphics, improved audio, video and camera capabilities ensuring the music and communication applications provides an real-time experience to the user. Also, USB audio support is provided with USB audio devices into your Android device.

Summing up, Android 5.0 Lollipop comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player and also on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks.

Mobile Apps to Impact Software Development: Insightful Feeds



The vivid usage of mobility for users and businesses has become one of the most challenging rupture the CIO technologies. The evolution of iPhone back in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 have yet to extract its full potential in most of the software and IT sectors of enterprises.

Today there is a process of transformation of apps geared exclusively to end-users to even perform actions like calling a taxi or validate traffic conditions. This post portrays how with a lot of innovation corporate apps can popularize explosively, not only as individual productivity tools but even be responsible for new business models of companies.

The Wave of Mobile Apps in Software Industry

Software architects should look at the apps as a central part of its strategy to create more modern systems. To meet that, mobile apps shouldn’t remind as miniature applications or simply a variant of an existing application, but a “new type of programs”. But this requires profound changes in current processes of systems development to mobile app development.

Intruding the maximum possible functionality

When a system becomes more complex, with upgrades in lengthy cycles, the harder it becomes to complete it besides raising the cost of maintenance. Why should the number of features need to exceed the customers' demands? This adds little or nothing to your business.

Simplicity Applied To Corporate Systems

In the world of apps, why take pain of adding more features to the system? Yes, you can create a new collection of apps but only after preserving its simplicity in the eyes of users.

"People-Centric" Design Rather Than "Process-Centric"

Goes by the definition, "process-centric" focus on the process and does not consider who the user at each moment. To achieve this, the app should use your entire technological potential, geolocation, access to contextual information and so on. Plus, it has to take into account how and where the users engage with the app.

To conclude, the paradigm of app development in the coming years involves with architecture and systems development to create new business solutions. Yes, it’s of course the world of apps.

How We Can Improve The Performance of Your Hybrid Mobile Application


A mobile apps performance is an overlooked and improperly-defined mobile project requirement but how do you define it? To be more specific, how is it possible to develop a high-performance mobile enterprise application?

An apps performance is measured on the basis of its

1. Loading and execution time, and

2. Responsiveness and Smoothness of User Interactions.

In this post, we shall focus on Apache Cordova hybrid mobile app- one of the most popular choices for mobile enterprise regardless to any industry.

Improve the App Loading Speed

Minimum Network Usage: In general, a mobile enterprise application, purely offline, is used to access server data or services because of its relatively slow and unstable network speed. Minimize network requests by cache static resources in your application or by preloading the required information when your application starts can certainly improve the loading speed.

Minimize The Number Of Requests: With Cordova plug-ins, it is possible to providing native access to the mobile applications. Perhaps, you will need to consider storing the content in the native layer and returning the content key back to the web tier. This way you would be able to retrieve the data by the key across the web and Cordova tiers.

Responsiveness and Smoothness of User Interactions

Leverage hardware-accelerated CSS:  By default, mobile applications of these days are known for their transition effects and animation due to the "education" of native user experience. The trick here is to delegate unnecessary Document Object Model depth of elements that are going to be transitioned and animated.

Keep It Simple: Despite the fact that CSS3 modules help us easily achieve wonderful styles and effects anything excessive actually kill the image performance of your application. Whilst designers keep on adding transparency and shadows to elements, excessive use of hardware acceleration can cause memory swapping, eventually affecting performance. So, better stay simple in graphics and style.




Thursday, 9 October 2014

Will the Android Ecosystem Grow Numb With the Apple's Big Day, this Christmas?


The global stats say more than 50% of apps available on both mobile OSs fail to entice users while the share of apps is being opened up only once have gone down from 26% in 2011 to 20% in 2014. By the release of the latest iOS, a radical departure from Apple's norm dig deep into that the Android ecosystem is expected to face a big hurt.  Does this mean Android's global dominance might take a hit? That’s what many of us say in recent times. But it is still a talk. Let’s check in detail about the growing controversies.

Where Does Apple Stands, Globally?

Apple has completely redesigned the interface and enlarged the iPhone. No one can ever beat the way how this smarty releases a product on the planet, and their marketing team knows how to build consumers into frenzy. Is it affecting the Android apps? Here's how it will unfold. Globally, Apple will see a minor rise in market share but yes, USA will see a significant rise in market share. The findings are derived from studies that measured the app usage that were downloaded in the third calendar quarter in last four years and tracks down which offers the best user experience.


IS Android Performing Better Than iOS?

Android apps are retentively much more visible while one-fourth of iOS apps are likely to be opened once and then never visited later. Better user interface, high availability of free-apps and larger screen size can be important reasons for higher retentivity in the former OS. But back in 2013, a report claims that iPhone users generated more mobile traffic than Android. Why because, Weather apps and social networking apps are least abandon while sports and gaming apps have the highest. Also, by 2016, it is expected the app market would double while the business and productivity app market is likely to be $58 million worth which is why Android developers are more focusing on user satisfaction and user engagement.

In precise, a release doesn’t matter when the audience poll stands high? All that you need is to develop a light weight apps that can generate more user engagement.



How to Boost Your Small Business with a Great App Platform



Whether it’s a student or corporate business head, it is good to start off with a platform that’s been widely used by hundreds of millions of users. Designed over the Linux kernel and launched by Google Android serves as world’s majorly used Smartphone OS and possesses sturdy scalable. The demand for Android mobile Application development has boosted tremendously owing to its strong popularity across the entire mobile domain and availability on a vast range of devices.

Let’s see what experts feel about developing an app in Android.

Factors to Choose Android Mobile Application Development

There are a numerous factors to choose Android mobile application development. This includes:

·         Founded on Linux which offers effortless accessibility to rich development environment

·         The overall time and cost for development and maintenance is less and has a considerable high user base


·         Offers substantial return on investments and higher revenues

·         Plenty of open source libraries available and the development tools are easy to use and integrate.

·         Unlike with strict guidelines in case of apple apps, Google Android is a very lenient system.

Besides, it’s the role played by app developers. The most successful mobile app developers understand the importance of performance, quality and robustness across the array of mobile devices that their customers use. In fact, over 17.7 million tests were run on 288 distinct Android hardware models for different versions. 

The goal for this research was to identify the most common problems and challenges that Android developer’s face. Four things an android app developer must consider:

·         Light weight apps can generate more user engagement.

·         Another factor that has an effect on engagement and app usage is UI.

·         All highly usage apps though available for free do generate revenue through ad-display. More the user’s interaction, higher the revenue counters.


Want to the app retention to continue to grow among users? The app market is flooded with personalized apps dealing developers offering solutions on the go. But picking the right one...


How Game-Based Education Can Impact Commercial Market


Driving force of education through documents may not be ready for game-based learning but then, people can accomplish with an open source game and teamwork says a recent research. Advanced educational apps can emphasis major improvements in a vast range of skills that include reading skills, vocabulary, comprehension, memory power, grammar, and cognitive skills.

The current challenge is that many commercial game developers are more focused on creating mobile apps geared toward adult consumers than designing games that have a positive impact on classroom learning. How does that impact business? Let’s read on.


Entertainment

When it comes to using educational games a common misunderstanding is that they are designed to simply entertain students. But that’s not true. In spite of the fact that game based educational technology is to provide a more effective learning experience but students to enjoy the learning process, it should becomes more entertaining.

Educational Concepts

Adequately capturing complex ideas is a challenge in education. This leads with creating a story involving a meaningful layer of education. Only professional developers with many creative ideas can make this happen; produce games that can teach students standard lessons as well as concepts that are a challenge to grasp.

Elaborating the Concepts

Many educators consider creating materials and educational games is one tool but requiring elaborating on concepts and ideas addressed within a game. It can also be used as part of a question and answer session and more so that more number of students can be invoked in the virtual world to its application in the real world.


It's of no surprise that in this technological age, educational games and the concept of game based learning is gaining more notoriety. Be it a commercial game app or learning game, the player is tasked with learning a combination of actions and responses. And, this requires creative game designers to build similar products in every discipline taking the role of education to a new height.