Friday 24 June 2016

HOW TO DESIGN AND BUILD YOUR OWN MOBILE APP

Source - fueled.com

Do you have a great idea for an app?
With the app ecosystem thriving, it’s an ideal time to transition your vision for an app into a reality. With a plan and guide, even an inexperienced entrepreneur or individual without coding capabilities can successfully produce an app.
We asked Fueled Strategist Perry Curac-Dahl to break down the process of building an app into four phases.
These four steps will take an app all the way from an idea to an in-market product, or Minimum Viable Product that is ready to be reviewed and improved.
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
An MVP is the early version of an app or product that is developed only with the necessary and sufficient features to satisfy the early user. Typically, once feedback is received from users of the MVP, an app will be developed and designed with a more complete set of features. This guide will take you through the process of taking your idea for an app and turning it into an MVP.

PHASE ONE: IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM

Before enlisting the help of an app development agency, Curac-Dahl recommends taking the time to identify and hone in on “the underlying problem” that you want your app to mitigate. At this point, you don’t need to worry about the specific elements of your app such as its minor design details, but you should be strongly focusing on the issue that your app is here to fix. To succeed, your app needs to solve a problem or hold a value to the user, and a truly successful app will manage to do both. You want to focus on the problem, so don’t immediately jump into trying to determine the solution.
What if another app seems to deal with the same problem that yours aims to?
“Don’t let competition deter you,” says Curac-Dahl. “Competition shows that there is a market there” for your product and if your idea for an app is a good one, odds are that “multiple people are going to have the same idea.” Think about it: Seamless, DoorDash, Caviar and plenty of other companies offer restaurant food delivery. If you come across apps that seem to solve the problem that yours aims to, consider what will distinguish yours from competitors while still targeting the audience that is proven to exist by your competition.
Instead of worrying that you are too late with your idea, consider the benefits of second mover advantage. Moreover, by following similar products into the market, you can learn from their successes and failures to adapt your own app based on your findings.

PHASE TWO: DETERMINE A SOLUTION

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Once you have clearly defined the problem that your app will aim to solve, it’s time to begin formulating your solution. The first version of your product can’t possibly be anything more than a guess and at best, it will be an educated one. Only once it is out on the market can you receive external feedback that will be telling of its capabilities.
In order to present an educated guess in this first version, enlisting the help of experts is a must. Curac-Dahl recommends coming to a place like Fueled: “We have experts in the space who can help you develop an ideal first solution.” If you can afford it, working with an app development agency will provide you with expert insight and experience.

PHASE THREE: BUILD THE FIRST VERSION OF YOUR APP

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Now that you have a clear idea of the problem and the solution you intend to offer, it’s time to build the first version of your app and get it to market quickly. It’s extremely important at this point to build and launch a Minimum Viable Product that is high quality. With over one million apps available in the App Store and in Google Play, competition is high and low-quality apps with a substandard user experience won’t succeed.
Create a Feature Set:
Whether you are building your app yourself, with your own team, or with a development agency, you should create a feature set. A feature set is a written document that details the specifications of an app, including the design of the product and a description of the technologies needed for the project. A feature set will make it easier to communicate your product vision with team members, developers, and investors, and it will serve as a reference throughout the process of building the app. Additionally, the exercise of creating a feature set will help you to define and narrow your product.
Create a wireframe:
A wireframe is basically a blueprint or basic framework of the screens that will be included in your app. The easiest and quickest way to create a wireframe is by using pen and paper. At this point, you can begin imagining the physical features of your app. Try to draw out each screen of your product from start to end, and think about the experience you want your users to have when using it. While going through this exercise of creating a basic wireframe, remember to focus on your defined product and don’t get carried away envisioning unnecessary elements.
Your feature set should include:
  • An introduction to your product
  • The vision for your app in terms of the product, design, and business
  • A detailed description of the technical features of your app and each page of your app
Now it’s time to talk about coding.

TO CODE YOURSELF OR TO OUTSOURCE?

When it comes to coding an app, you have three options: you can either hire an app development agency to build and design your product, you can create your own internal design and development team, or you can build the app yourself.
If you can afford it, hiring an app development agency to build your app is your best bet. Because of their experience, a reputable development shop will likely deliver a high-quality app in a short period of time. If built by a well-regarded shop, your app will be worked on by a team of individuals, each of whom is an expert in his or her own field. These development and design experts are likely to have a good grasp on the ever-changing landscape of app competition and Apple Store acceptance, and they will use this knowledge to your app’s advantage throughout the development process. Here’s more on the price of developing an app.
Putting together a team of designers and developers is another way to approach building your app. While there are definite upsides to keeping development internal, the process of building a team is often time-consuming and expensive. Curac-Dahl warns that unlike the well-oiled machine of agencies, there is no guarantee that a team you have put together yourself “will work well together.”
It’s also possible to develop a first version app on your own. However, doing so requires having full stack developing capabilities (the ability to do both front-end and back-end development) – not to mention, a lot of time. Moreover, Curac-Dahl comments, “If any of these factors aren’t in existence, it’s beneficial to hire someone.”

PHASE FOUR: REVIEW AND REBUILD WITH MARKET FEEDBACK

Whether you’ve built your app yourself or have hired an agency to help you, once you are satisfied with your product, you can release it to the market. Although this is the fourth phase, you are still at a very early stage of the process to making a successful app. Only once your app is out will you be able to see its positive features and shortcomings, and only at this point can your product evolve and improve with feedback and input from the market.

WATCH YOUTUBE VIDEOS UPLOADED FROM YOUR LOCALITY

By Ishant Gupta
WATCH YOUTUBE VIDEOS UPLOADED FROM YOUR LOCALITY
It is quite possible that a YouTube celebrity resides in your locality! This could be someone from your locality who uploads YouTube videos. Probably, there might be a video about a school, park or temple of your locality or a video of places nearby your house on YouTube but you might not know about it. But you can now get all the YouTube videos of your locality at one place. A newly introduced web app, called as ‘Videos near me’, can help you to do just that. This app actually uses the Geo-tagging feature of YouTube and shows YouTube videos from around 2 miles of the chosen Google Maps location.

How to get ‘videos near me’
First, log on to this website:


This is an app which can show you all videos from one location without having to redirect to a different window. At the top, you will see Google Maps. You can select the required location by zooming it. For doing this, drag the ‘red marker’ and drop it at the required location. Then, it will automatically show the videos uploaded from that location.

UPLOAD PHOTOGRAPHS AND WIN PRAISE

By Ishant Gupta
UPLOAD PHOTOGRAPHS AND WIN PRAISE
Do you love photography? Then you must also be facing difficulties managing your photographs. You can make this tedious task easier with the help of photo sharing websites.

If you are a passionate photographer, you must be having a huge collection of photographs. In today’s world, almost everyone tries to perfect the art of photography using good smartphones and digital cameras. However, there arises a concern about storing these photographs.


It is not a bad option to store your photographs on your computer’s hard disk. However, the hard disk can crash at times or you might delete photos by mistake. Thus, it could be safer to save the photos online. The advantage is that you can download these photos from anywhere in the world. All this has been possible thanks to the photo sharing websites. 
The greatest advantage of these websites is that you can gain popularity as a good photographer in the online world. And it is the best way of sharing photos with your friends. For this, it is necessary for you to have an account on these websites. These websites now offer lot of features. Hence, with the help of these websites, you can show your talent to the whole world. Plus, it is very easy to work with these websites. You don’t need to understand any new technique additionally. If you want the world to know how good a photographer you are, you should take help of these photo sharing websites.

Using Flickr you can share your photos on Facebook, Twitter and on blogs. There are many ways to upload your photographs here. If you wish, you can directly upload a photograph from your mobile phone. It is also very easy to upload photos via email or web browser. World famous art photos are available on Flickr. You can choose between two types of accounts- free and paid. Using the free account, you can upload photos of upto 300 MB each month.

Here you have the online version of the photoshop software. You can add effects to your photographs with the help of this website. You also get a free space of about 2 GB to store your photographs. It also offers options like slide show and image gallery.

This website by Google offers many important apps. Most importantly, you can use the slide show creating tool to create an album of professional quality. Picasa also provides a photo sharing application. Once you download it on your computer, you can search photos on your computer and you can upload them. If you wish, you can also upload these photographs on Google’s social networking website Google Plus. Using it’s free account you can upload unlimited photographs.

Here you can create an album of your photographs. It’s free account allows to upload photographs of upto 500 MB and around 20 videos. Working with this website is extremely easy.

Using free account on Photobucket you can upload unlimited photographs. Just remember to keep the total size of photographs below 5 MB. You can also edit the photos and graphics. It provides an easy option of creating slide show of photographs as well as sharing photos with friends.

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