Day: March 1, 2012

Cool Deals for Designers

Being a designer has its share of incentives too. Many web hosting companies, software resellers and internet companies offer discounts, deals and even cool freebies to discerning web designers. There are several deals at the moment for people who are interested in web designing and related activities. CSS-Tricks CSS-Tricks has a number of deals for designers. They have listed quite a lot of deals that could catch anybody’s attention, and some of them are a steal: 20% off on  CSSIgniter, UpThemes, Themify, ThemesKingdom and ThemeShift AND, 30% on WPCrown AND 25% on VivaThemes – all sites that sells WordPress themes. All in all, you should not buy a WordPress theme (or theme site membership) without checking out this deal page! 50% off on Ultimate Designer toolkit. The toolkit comes with patterns, brushes, gradients, vector illustrations, textures and photos. If you need some interesting icons for your web or mobile application, you might like to get it from WebIconSet, which is offering 20% discount. Last, but not the least, you can also get the stock photos at a 15% discount from DepositPhotos Remember: To get these deals, you must go to http://css-tricks.com/deals/ and then follow the link. You may not get any discount, if you go directly. Mighty Deals On MightyDeals.com, you could sign up and receive a number of deals right in your email. At the moment, they offer a 50% discount on Aurora 3D Animation Maker. At just $35, this cool tool is a great help when it comes to designing feature and graphics rich websites for clients. The tool comes with more than 3000 symbols and one could import SVG files. With 60 plus professional project templates and more than 80 object styles, no web designer would ever feel lost when he or she is trying to design professional websites. In fact, it is pretty simple to create animated videos, Flash SWF, animated GIF or just as a sequence of images. All that you would need to do is download and install Aurora 3D Animation Maker. It hardly takes a few minutes. The software comes with special features such as capability to emulate smoke, fireworks and even emptiness of space! The software requires Mac OS 10.6 or later or Windows XP/Vista/7. Inspired Mag Deals InspiredMag is yet another place where you can land up in many deals! Some of the cooler deals that we thought were superb include the 300 PICAS vector Icons, which cost $50, but with a heavy discount, one could get it for just $15. These are royalty free vector icons that are specially designed for web, mobile and GUI interfaces. If you thought market research was a tough job, you could go ahead and buy AYTM’s new tool for market research. It comes with tools to write surveys and mail them to your target audience. Responses are delivered within a few hours and you would even get clear description of your data. At $89, it is a real steal. Designer Daily Deals Similarly, Designer Daily has deals that are offered everyday for web designers. Design Delight Offers DesignDelight offers discounts and deals too and one of the interesting deal is that of PSD to HTML conversion tool, which costs only $68 after discount. It is pretty clear that these days most people prefer HTML based websites, than heavy PSD files. This tool could prove to be a lifesaver. Conclusion With deals becoming increasingly popular, and with the high prevalence of social media to market these deals, it is now well accepted in the web design community as well. Also, since most of the products required by designers are info-products, i.e. things that can be replicated without extra cost, discounts can be steep. Hence, this segment is going to stay – even if the popular deal sites offering discounts on food, health and travel struggles! So, keep hunting – and may be share some of the current deals with readers of this blog.  

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Cross Platform Mobile App Development

Recently I switched from iPhone to Nexus S. This was a major transition as I moved away from iOS to Android. There were few Apps and Games which I liked a lot in my iPhone and naturally after I started using my Nexus S, I tried searching for those Apps and Games in Android Market, as I never wanted to be departed from those. Like me there are many such users who have a similar instinct. I was surprised to find the exact same games and Apps for Android as I was using in my iPhone. This made me more inquisitive to find out how these little things are developed to provide the same user experience and feel in various platforms. Generally the marketplace for any Smart Phone platform contains the native apps for those platforms. And these native Apps are notoriously known to have compatible issues. So any native App developed for one platform will work only in that platform. So in order to have same Apps or Games available in all the Smart Phone platforms same App needs to be developed separately for each platform. This is not only time consuming but also requires additional overheads. To address this, another category of App called Hybrid Apps took birth. The Hybrid Apps successfully bridged the gap between Native App and Web App and also solved the major issue of cross platform compatibility. Cross Platform App development methodology As technology is constantly evolving, we have a plethora of tools and frameworks at our expense to build real cross platform applications which can even access most of the native features of the device in which it will run. One such technique of building cross platform mobile app is called cross compilation. The framework used in this process provides a platform independent API using dynamic languages like JavaScript, Python or Ruby. This API is used to build the mobile application. The code is then processed by a cross compiler which transforms it into platform specific native app based upon the target platform. The applications developed in this way are faster and can access most of the native features of the device like camera, GPS etc. Another method in which we can develop cross platform application is by using the virtual machine technique. In this method, the framework used will provide an API as well as the runtime environment for the app. The main disadvantage of this method is slower performance. Another more popular but less powerful method is building mobile web app using HTML5 and CSS3. The powerful nature of HTML5 and CSS3 let us build apps that gives almost similar user experience like a native app. Usage of JavaScript framework like Sencha Touch can take this approach further. Cross Platform Frameworks There are lots of cross platform framework available, few of them with Open Source license and few with commercial license. Some are quite powerful and some are there just for the sake of it’s existence. The most widely used and popular among them are PhoneGaap, Appaccelerator Titanium, Rhodes, Adobe Air, Sencha Touch, Jquery Mobile etc. PhoneGap PhoneGap is the most popular framework to create Cross Platform application easily. It leverages the power of standard web technology like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build native applications. It is popular because of it’s flexibility, ease of use and open source nature. PhoneGap uses the web approach for app development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and run on a mobile browser embedded on a thin native App wrapper available for all supported platform e.g. iOS, Android, Blackberry, Web OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile 6.5. The native device features are accessed via a device independent JavaScript API. PhoneGap lacks support for native UI components and dev tools. But it can be used with other UI reach libraries like Sencha Touch and JQuery Mobile to provide superior User Experience. The table below shows which device features PhoneGap can access under different platform. Titanium Titanium is used for both cross platform mobile application development as well as development of desktop application. It is based on the cross compilation technique we discussed above. Before the launch of Titanium mobile SDK the cross platform mobile app was a distant dream and the only way was to create same app for different platform was rebuilding the complete app from scratch for different platform. So Titanium is the pioneer in cross platform mobile app development technology. Titanium mobile SDK supports over 5000 UI elements and hardware controls thus gives a superior user experience and gives a truly native app. Titanium is currently supported under the two most widely used platform iOS and Android and support for blackberry will be introduced soon (currently in beta). The primary advantage is much faster performance, ease of use and built in UI elements and the disadvantage is, it currently supports only a few platforms. The table below shows access to device native features under different mobile OS platform for Titanium. Rhodes Rhodes framework is based on the virtual machine technique of building cross platform mobile app. This provides a complete toolbox for developing end to end cross platform mobile apps. It uses Ruby to build the business logic and the UI is coded in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This provides a templating language which helps in building portable UI. It uses JQTouch to provide animation capability in webkit based browser as well as native feel. Rhodes framework is supported under iOS, Android, Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry and Symbian. Main disadvantage of Rhodes is any update in the code requires a complete rebuild. It uses a not so popular programming language so popularity is less. The table below shows access to device native features under different mobile OS platform for Rhodes. Sencha Touch Sencha Touch is world’s first cross platform JavaScript framework for developing mobile web app. It leverages the power of HTML5, CSS3 and JavScript to give superior App that gives the look and feel of native app. Sencha Touch is based on

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