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The changing shape of mobile apps

In the mobile device world, there is no such thing as one size fits all. Although just two mobile platforms dominate the market today – Android and iOS – applications will need to work well on devices of all shapes and sizes, from the sleekest smartphones to the bulkiest tablets.- Mobile app developmentMobile app development

Apps might also need the ability to support new classes of a mobile device as and when they take off, such as smartwatches or augmented reality viewers such as Microsoft’s HoloLens. And the explosion of fixed and mobile connected sensors and appliances – the internet of things (IoT) – opens up countless opportunities
to develop ever more useful mobile apps that control and/ or communicate with these devices to enable innovative capabilities and services.

So how do organizations achieve the agility they need to develop useful and compelling mobile apps and services, in a timely and repeatable way, that continually delight customers? Should they opt for cross-platform web apps or create separate native apps for Android and iOS, optimized for different-sized devices? And what is the best way to organize development teams and processes? Among those at the forefront of mobile innovation, opinions on the most productive approaches to mobile development vary, but it is possible to draw out some common threads.

Native versus cross-platform apps – Mobile app development

On the question of whether it is better to develop native apps or go for a cross-platform approach, there is no right or wrong answer – it depends on the business’s needs and its customers’ preferences. Many organizations deploy both.

Innovation consultant Nick Lansley spent three decades at Tesco, including over 10 years as head of research and development and latterly as head of open innovation at Tesco Labs. Having talked to many customers, he believes that although there are pros and cons to both the native and cross-platform approaches, native apps generally offer
the most advantages for retailers. Continue reading

How component-based software engineering spurs innovation?

Demands for digital transformation in business may ring hollow to some architects. However, componentization can play a key role in making business innovation a reality. – Software engineeringsoftware engineering

Architects and developers have too many priorities and too many high-level goals as it is. The introduction of broad business imperatives, such as application modernization and digital transformation, do little to create a technical approach or define a software architecture.

The best way to really approach these demands is to get your terms straight, frame applications along modern cloud component lines, introduce component-based software engineering to make processes match business needs and recognize productivity and technology trends as equals.

The strategy – software engineering

A primary technical step in creating a business transformation bridge is to focus on component-based software engineering, part of which involves having a componentization strategy. Componentization is driven by two forces: functional requirements from the business transformation side and technical requirements from the application modernization side.

The functional side of componentization is created by the tasks workers perform and the application tools they use. The goal of functional componentization is to create components at the highest level and avoid a specialization of functions that limit sharing components among applications. Continue reading

What are the emerging trends in software development?

Make software engineering quality job one

It seems like every year will be — or at least should be — the year of software engineering quality, but somehow 2018 feels different. Pride in workmanship is what drives developers to create better software, and that can’t besoftware development standardized.

A 2017 survey conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes for the software analysis and measurement company Cast asked developers what factors led them to produce high-quality software. Respondents didn’t cite industry standards much (just 8%) and instead said they were inspired by pride in workmanship (20% of those surveyed).That’s great, as far as it goes, but Bill Curtis, chief scientist at Cast, said much bigger forces will also put software engineering quality under the microscope.

Security breaches and app failures mean quality is now a boardroom-level issue, he said, and that will mean sweeping changes in software development trends. In 2017, just one-third of developers were actually graded on software engineering quality, the Cast survey showed. That will change. “IT organizations will demand greater accountability from their software suppliers and will request a certification of code quality, with penalties when it is insufficient, in 2018,” Curtis said.

Software engineering quality has been completely insufficient for far too long, according to app users, said Theresa Lanowitz, head analyst at Voke Research. Consumers are tired of apps that don’t work, and she tied that directly to the trend in software development to focus on speed rather than quality. Continue reading

All areas of IT must brace for artificial intelligence impact

Throwing artificial intelligence (AI)  at your data to answer business questions is like using a tornado to blow out a match. In other words, just because artificial intelligence tools can provide answers doesn’t mean you should use artificial intelligencethem. If good old business intelligence tools do the job just fine, stick with what you know. But AI is a great way to uncover information hidden within vast amounts of data – as long as you’re willing to use the information that surprises you, according to Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, a synaptic intelligence company based in Cambridge, Mass.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies

“If you aren’t willing to learn, don’t do an AI project. Do a regular analytics project,” Eggers said during her presentation at the TDWI Accelerate conference in Boston earlier this year.

That’s sound advice in a time when all we hear about is the power and promise of AI technologies like cognitive computing, natural language processing, and machine learning. Using AI judiciously can save companies a whole lot of time and money on a tech that’s exciting but may not be appropriate for the job. It’s also important to carefully Continue reading

Is your computer secretly being used for crypto mining?

It’s staggering to realize that Bitcoin, the very first cryptocurrency, splashed onto the scene almost a decade ago. It’s only been over this past year that digital coinage has really gained its tremendous popularity. As of January 2018, cryptocurrencythere are well over one thousand varieties of cryptocurrency in circulation — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, IOTA and many more.

But whether you participate in the buying and selling of cryptocurrency or you know nothing about it, you could be a victim of cryptojacking. Oftentimes, people don’t even notice that their machine has been hijacked. Here’s what you need to know in order to defend yourself.

It’s the age of cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is digital money you use to make secure and anonymous online payments without involving a bank. All the purchases and transfers are encrypted, stored, and recorded in a ledger. The later is known as a blockchain, a kind of living history book of cryptocurrency. All its data securely encrypted with uncrackable code.

Every single transaction for every single bit of cryptocurrency is recorded in the blockchain. This requires an enormous amount of computer processing power, and that’s where the cryptominers come in. Continue reading

Leadership, strategies, and  vision in SaaS Solutions

CEOs play a number of vital roles in their organizations: leader, strategy setter, steward and primary visionary.
Achieving those leadership goals, strategic plans and visions are easier and more effective for CEOs who embrace one of the key enablers of business change today—cloud services.SaaS solutions

In the current era of rapid and often unpredictable change, CEOs can find it difficult to keep their organizations relevant, profitable and competitive—corporate upheaval is often just one rival’s innovation or one unforeseen geopolitical or economic development away So what do you, the CEO, need to know about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and how that can enable your organisation to transform for the digital business era?

It’s one thing to know that cloud computing offers so much for any business that wants to serve customers and stakeholders 24/7, from anywhere and via any device. But CEOs must also understand the complete business case for Software-as-a-Service—the financial impacts, risk aspects and other potential competitive advantages.

To fully comprehend all of the business implications of cloud computing, CEOs need to keep the following in mind: Continue reading

Meltdown and Spectre: Is your PC vulnerable?

A new app gives you a simple overview of your system’s vulnerability status, as well as what kind of performance hit the patches might be having.- Meltdown and SpectreMeltdown and Spectre

Want to know if your PCs are vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre attacks? Want to get an idea of the sort of performance hit the patches might entail? Want to temporarily disable the update for testing purposes? There’s an app that can do all this.

Enter InSpectre, yet another excellent freeware utility created by Steve Gibson of GRC.com.

Using InSpectre is about as simple as it gets – download the 126KB file (yes, kilobytes, not megabytes!), and on first run (no, there’s no installation process) it will give you a clear overview of your system’s Meltdown and Spectre status, as well as offering an indication as to whether the patches have an impact on system performance (this is based on the processor/operating system information and not a benchmark).

InSpectre can also be used to disable protection on PCs (note that enabling and disabling protection requires a reboot)? Why might you want to do that? Well, you might want to do this for testing purposes or to regain lost performance. Continue reading

Keylogger campaign returns, infecting 2,000 WordPress sites

Over 2,000 WordPress sites are infected with a malicious script that can deliver both a keylogger and the in-browser cryptocurrency miner CoinHive. – KeyloggerKeylogger

Researchers at Sucuri who made the discovery said the recent campaign is tied to threat actors behind a December 2017 campaign that infected over 5,500 WordPress sites. Both incidents used a keylogger/cryptocurrency malware called Cloudflare solutions. The name is derived from the domain used to serve up the malicious scripts in the first campaign, Cloudflare solutions.

Cloudflare solutions – Keylogger Campaign

Cloudflare solutions are in no way related to network management and security firm Cloudflare.

“While these new attacks do not yet appear to be as massive as the original Cloudflare solutions, the reinfection rate shows that there are still many sites that have failed to properly protect themselves after the original infection,” wrote Denis Sinegubko, a senior malware researcher at Sucuri who authored research blog this week. Continue reading

Three mobile application development trends IT should track

Keep up with the latest advancements in mobile application development, such as AI and big data integration, and see which trends IT and developers are tracking in the enterprise.- Mobile app development Mobile app development

Just like the trees through the four seasons, mobile application developers are used to changing. This new season has brought three trends that are quickly becoming essential to keep track of for organizations both big and small.

One constant in mobile application development is that nothing is constant for long. Emerging technology has adapted to the modern mobile world and is geared toward advancing mobile app development at a rapid pace. The enterprise is looking for applications that can work across multiple platforms and still provide an excellent UI. Developers are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to produce and integrate big data, enhancing the user experience and application integration into workplaces previously untouched.

The driving force behind the latest mobile app development trends is user experience (UX). If employees cannot do their work on the application due to an incompatible user interface or continuous lags, productivity halts. The quicker IT and developers embrace these top mobile app development trends and implement them, the sooner organizations can get ahead of the game. Continue reading

Organizations modernize legacy applications to explore cloud benefits

Most large enterprises run some form of  legacy applications, for which updates and replacements can be costly and time-consuming, not to mention potentially risky. But failing to modernize out-of-date systems can ultimately damage app performance via slow runtime speeds and poor load balancing.applications

Many organizations have begun to take on modernization projects with containers, to gain benefits such as portability and scalability, better speed and resource management, and granular visibility. One of the primary challenges to modernization is to get the entire IT team on board, said Chris Gardner, senior analyst at Forrester.

Developers typically are ahead of the curve, while operations teams drag their feet to maintain a currently functional — and secure — architecture. Enterprises’ reliance on time-consuming manual processes and tools that were de rigueur with legacy applications also hinders modernization efforts. If a batch process is how you’ve always done things, and the application is stable because of this, sysadmins will be loath to change it — especially in a risk-averse industry such as finance or healthcare. But manual processes take up valuable time and leave room for error, a bottleneck that opens the door to automation.

Developers won’t naturally become ops people; it’s not in their nature, Gardner said. They need to continue to focus on delivering apps and user experiences as quickly as possible. Instead, systems administrators must become developers to revitalize production support for applications. They also must emphasize proven ops processes while adopting new methods, such as infrastructure as code. Continue reading