Category: Hire Developers

In today’s fast-moving era of technology, we are all surrounded by apps and technical advancements. Today, we are all guarded heavily with app developers and it is proven that an average internet user uses at least 4 apps in a day.

As a business, the making or usage of apps is even more mandate, as the end users are becoming technologically smart and everybody wants all features on the go. There are some businesses who have their in-house apps, while a lot of them hire app developer and then go for external or third-party apps. Whatever, it may be, the fact is that all businesses today – old or new cannot miss the aspect of virtual presence. Today, they are bringing in all their transactions in the form of apps – be it online booking, payments or just viewing the services.

That is why an app has become imperative for obvious reasons. In order to sustain in the market today, you have to get a hang of good apps and that is when the whole role of app developers come into place. While you hire an app developer, here are some dos and don’ts that will help you to identify the best one in the market –

Dos:

Here are some points that you must add to your checklist of choosing the right app developer –

• Previous experiences matters
Experience in this field is very important. The developer that you hire, must have a lot of previous experience in the domain that you want the app to be developed. This is because, for an amateur, it may become tough to live by the mandate requirements of the market and company.

• In-depth knowledge of your domain
Say, you belong from the hospitality sector and wish to get an app developed in this sector only. For this, would you prefer somebody who doesn’t have any knowledge in your domain, and you have to explain everything? Or would you want somebody who knows your domain well, and has relevant experience? So that you don’t have to explain anything and they know how the industry works already?

• The app developer shall be able to build apps on various platforms
Ask yourself the question, “which platform you want the app to be developed?” you may have A as your answer, and when you ask your partner the same question, they may have B as an answer. Well, ask the same to your employees, they may suggest C. Now what do you do? In such scenarios, wouldn’t you prefer to hire an app developer, that can build you an app on various platforms? Well, this being one reason and also – the market is so volatile that you might not want to keep investing, again and again, to rebuild the same app in different versions.

• Technology is the key
Oh yes! Actually, this point should have topped the chart, but we did not want to freak your out, quite honestly! While you hire a team of app developers, it is quite a basic task that you ensure they are always high on technology. There will be a lot of technical aspects to this, which you may not be aware of, but they should know it. Thus, when you are on the lookout for hiring a team, try to have a look at their previous experiences, and have a chat with their app developers.

• Strong app portfolio
You may need just a basic app, but it is actually the duty of the app development team to suggest you better versions and portfolios of applications and mobile apps. The team of app developers shall also be in a position to use different technological stacks for various app platforms. One size fits all, may not work when you have a varied type of requirement, and the team that you hire shall be able to understand that requirement.

• Have a look at their experience portfolio
This will help you to judge their words and their actions. Not that the company and the team will lie, but it will help you to match your preferences with the kind of work they have done before. This will also help you analyze which technology have they worked on before and does it sync with what you are looking at! This will also help you to keep an eye on the capability and professionalism of the company. Having a look at their portfolio will give you a close watch on the projects that have worked on before and you will know, in a vague manner if they will be able to work on your project or not. Also, you will know if the team is giving you new ideas and concepts, to make your app unique.

• Settle in for a team that is more creative and innovative
Well, we know you will not be able to gauge a developer on this basis on one go, and that is why we highly recommend that you have long chats and conversations with the team, have a look at their previous experience and portfolios. Also, when you talk to them, ask them how to go about, and give them hints about what you are looking at. Ask them to come up with a rough draft of your app and see how creative it is. Tell them you don’t like and then see, how innovative they can be, in order to modify it as per your preferences. Also, they should not only be creative with ideas, but they should also be more innovative when it comes to usage of open source platforms. Check their creativity in terms of the persona of users as well, as that is an important factor of your app.

• Communication is the key
Wondering how this will affect? Well, do you want your app design to be great, but the content to be average? No, right? That is why it is highly important that you choose someone who has great communication skills – both spoken and written. This will also help them to communicate their ideas and designs in a more appealing manner.

• Quality cannot be ignored
Once you are on the process of getting your app developed, do not let the app developer do it at their own sweet time. Always, keep asking for updates and give your suggestions immediately. This will help you keep a quality check in control and will save your time of getting the whole app changed at the last moment.

Don’ts

Having these points in your mind will help you to eliminate teams and developers who are not qualified enough to help you develop an app –

• Pricing shall not be the judging criteria
Make this very clear in your mind, and also talk about the same thing to your team. When you are at a point of choosing one app development team for your company, do not take a hasty decision based on pricing. If pricing is a concern, then we would suggest – you just YouTube app development skills and do it on your own. There will be tons of app developers who will offer the low quality of services ate lower price. Hence, always do a thorough check of the portfolio of the app developer, and let price be the final checkpoint when you are hiring app developer. It is a smart choice to have your one-time investment worth so that you do not have to keep investing in the same arena. If you are doing this for the first time, you may not have an idea of the actual costs – for this, do extensive research, ask your colleagues who have gone through this process.

• Do not calculate your long terms returns on Simple Return on Investment
If you are not from a financial background, you may not be aware that there are actually three different types of Return on investments – simple return on investment, risk-return on investment and efficiency return on investment. When you are calculating if the process to hire an app developer, is actually worth or not, do not settle in just for the most simple one. Your product shall not just be able to reap your financials profits, but it should also be able to help you improve your efficiency and reduce all the risks associated with it.  Risks like malware or data protection shall also be eliminated.

• Do not opt for no documentation rules
Be it a substitute for an existing app or an altogether new venture into the virtual world, an app is an important aspect of your business. Do not settle in for any less than the best, and when you hire an app developer, always insist on documentation of everything. From the basics of what you agreed upon to, the pricing, timelines and the after-sales services that you have agreed upon. Either you document everything and ask the team to always give their confirmation on it, or go vice -versa. If you think emails and such communication modes are good enough, that may be it, or else, you can have proper physical documents made and signed by both parties.

This has two reasons – having everything documented, will help you to keep good terms in relation to business, as no party will be able to take undue advantage. Secondly, these documentations will come handy when you want to go for improvements, or upgradation of your app either through the same company or another app development team.

• Do not go for offshore companies who do not have a lot of resources
Now, here resources could be manpower, or it could be technological ones as well. This is one major thing that you must have a look at. Do not select any company that does not have the expertise or does not have the manpower to provide you with all that you are looking for.

Secondly, always refrain from hiring offshore app developers, as distance can play a crucial role in the best outcome. If the company is located in the same city as your, it becomes easy for you to communicate and check on progress. Also, having to hire app developer from another geographical location may have you end up paying increased costs based on that location and the company. Different country will bring in the time zone factor as well.

• Do not pick a company that does not offer any services after delivery
An app may require a lot of bug fixes and maintenance once the product is released in the market. You may also want the company to keep on updating their privacy terms, and update policies. Thus, it is very important that you negotiate on these terms beforehand and do not settle in for any company that does not offer you these maintenance related services for your app.

• App certificate and non-disclosure agreement shall not be ignored
Your app must be certified in order to be released into the market for usage. Do not go for app developers who do not have certified resources and app development tools. It is important that the app developer knows the legal requirements of the app, and abides by them strictly. A non-disclosure agreement is also important wherein, it states that the USPs of your app will not be disclosed by any other company.

• Do not choose a team that is not aware of the security and privacy aspects of an app
Last but not least, it is imperative that the app developer brings to your notice all those security and privacy aspects related to your company and app. Do your research and homework in such a way, that you do not regret later. There are tons of Government regulations that need to be followed in terms of security and privacy. When you hire an app developer, they should incorporate all those terms and shall also mention them in your privacy statement. You may want to check on this aspect much before you take the app developer on board for you.

When it comes to improving user experience, there are endless ways to do so. However, just search on Google and you will get various ways to boost the experience. Most of the results are based on tactical activities such as UI design trends, how to design articles, software tools and tutorials as well as fundamentals principles for UX design and development.

These are all important but these play only a small role when delivering a successful product which offers proper value to its users as well as your business. The product should actually help people to do things quickly and easily with accuracy.

Great user experience depends on how you think about the things from users view point. It is derived from the decision that you take about the tactical work. It is not about the decisions that you make; it is the entire matter of thinking and arriving at those decisions.

User experience does not depend on the look and feel of the content on the screen. The thing is whether these things are available in first place or not.

How is UX design actually prepared?

• Beginning with themes: Let’s say the web development team is using Bootstrap to develop a user friendly design. So, what will one first do? Obviously, the pre built bootstrap theme is selected. Then this theme can be the foundation of UI and UX design and it is available till the launch. This pre built theme actually looks nice but this was developed in vacuum. It doesn’t take into consideration the design and development of the project.
• Using the work of other designers and developers: When you start developing a design, the first thing you look at is a blank screen. In order to get the idea of the design, designers take a look at others work on Pinterest, Dribble etc. But this is actually wrong. Looking at others work won’t give you the perfect idea as to what design to prepare. The design that you are looking to is actually the solution of someone else’s problem. This problem may not be similar to the one of your clients as well as users. Here, it is not at all advisable to get the idea from someone else’s work.
• Making use of current UI trends: So, you got a client to get the website designed but are you thinking of doing a flat design as this is today’s hot trend and is used to most of the interactions. Designers directly adopt the design without knowing the situation or the need of the client. Most of the flat designs contain visual accordance that clearly define the purpose as well as the function.

So, what one must do to develop an appropriate design?

In order to offer a perfect design, one must first think before actually developing a design. Develop a perfect design with proper strategic thinking. This provides the base for good design that offers perfect user experience. Base is the important part of everything that one does while developing the design. Hence, if you skip that part then developers may design something that may not be liked by people or may not be used by them.

Hence, one must change the way one thinks to develop a perfect design that provides great UX. Few questions must be asked by designers to themselves before actually creating the design.

• Is the design going to offer potential reward that sums up the time and effort used to develop it?
• Does the function actually matters to the people? Will it suit the needs of the users?
• Will the user expectations be fulfilled? Will they be able to understand the design properly?

All the answers to these questions develop the base for user experience and when once the decisions are filtered then these change based on the foundation of the great design. In case of time and budget constraints, it is difficult to do anything with the design but here you will concentrate more on the important things instead of urgent things.

Wind Up

Hence, from now on; web designers must keep these things in mind while framing an amazing design for the users in order to provide them proper user experience.

For more such updates, stay tuned with Softqube Technologies, expert website developers in India.

For most of the PHP Server, it is very difficult task to carry out event based programming. In any programming language, events are more than any other function calls. Here, the meaningful code is still blocking.

With various languages like JavaScript; we come to know what PHP can be when event loops are taken at the centre. There are folks who have considered these insights and are then coded into event loops as well as HTTP Servers.

Here, in this blog post from Softqube Technologies; expert PHP developers in India, we will discuss about the process to develop an HTTP Server using PHP where it will be connected to Apache as this will quickly serve the static files.

So, let’s start the process:

Configuring Apache: When browsers request existing files then it is a good decision to serve them without considering the PHP interpreter. Apache is very fast and efficient in serving these files. Hence, here we will configure Apache in such a way that it can handle all the required static requests.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}:9001%{REQUEST_URI} [P]

This code can be placed inside the virtual host entry. It indicates Apache to send requests to missing files to a different port. Simply, we can say that when any browser requests “example.com/robots.txt”, apache will see whether the file exists or not and then it will return without spinning up the PHP interpreter.

In case, the file is not available then Apache will send the request to “http://example.com:9001/robots.txt.”

Simple HTTP Server:

Here, we will see how a server can be made with event loop. The HTTP server can be developed in such a way around the loop that new requests come to us in the form of events. Most of this process is abstracted away.

How to handle different routes?

It is one of the basic HTTP servers that one can create. It receives all the requests. In order to make it more useful, it is necessary to make use of some type of router. One of the widely used routers is League/Route.

The individual requests can then be separated to send more meaningful responses:

Using League Route is one of the methods that decide which route must belong to which request. It is often used alongside Symfony requests and responses. One will need to feed the request method as well as path target to the dispatcher.

Providing Complex Views:

For simple pages, strings are good. However, when one starts to create complicated applications then there may arise a need to use better tool. Here, using League Plates is a good choice. It is a template engine which adds various things like layouts as well as template inheritance on the top of PHP.

Now, the new layout template will be created. This will be from templates/ layout.php.

Wind Up

In this way with the help of any well known frameworks, one can develop a perfect Server quickly. Do you like to share your thoughts with us? Feel free to share with us your experiences while using PHP.

Have you heard about Social Logins? Today in this blog post from Softqube Technologies, Website Developers India we will learn everything about social logins, what they are, how they are useful and more.
So, let’s begin:

Social Logins – What are they?

With Social logins one can sign up on any app with their social media accounts may be Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Most of the mobile applications now allow this one time sign up by just providing a username and password.

It is a type of an open id which can be used to create accounts with same user name and password. It allows people to use one same password and username for accessing different systems. To understand this in a proper manner, here we have provided some social login examples:

• Pinterest: Pinterest app uses the Social login where in users can sign up and connect their Pinterest with Facebook. On the other hand, Pinterest can also post on the users’ Facebook timeline thus providing more product exposure as well as sign up from friends of their users.
• Stumble Upon: This is a social networking platform that offers a social login option which shows how social logins can make the login process easier for people. As compared to entering email and password, signing up via your Facebook account seems to be a simple process.If we talk about normal login option of Stumble upon then it asks for various fields like Name, email, Username, Password, Birth, Date and Sex. This information can be made available from a person’s Facebook profile.
• RunKeeper: Social supports provide health benefits. It is one of the good reason why it is good for Run keeper. This is a mobile app that is used to track running activities as well as provides option to connect with social media accounts.Posting various activities on social media can be one of the ways for getting socially engaged, motivated and providing support for runners who use this app.
• Karma: This is a pocket sized WiFi hotspot which allows people to connect and share wireless internet connection. Those who log in using their Facebook account can use person’s Facebook profile data like as Facebook ID, email address and photo.Facebook social login is an option to sign up but it is not mandatory. Here, users have choice whether to sign up using email id or using their Facebook account whatever is convenient to them.

How these social logins are beneficial?

While using social logins, users can easily sign in to the sites and apps within just few clicks. It also offers users particular process irrespective of the site they are actually signing into. Also, the need to manage several accounts can also be reduced.

• Users who wish to connect their social network to the apps grants you the ability to auto suggest their account settings.
• It makes your app more social and engaging which spreads the word about the app as well as creates more opportunities to get engaged.

Wind Up

Social logins are really useful as it saves effort and time. Most well known social media logins are Facebook, Twitter and Google. For more updates about such new tools; stay connected with us.