Category Archives: Apps

7 Apps That Will Make Your Life Easier

The age of the digital realm has given the opportunity for technology to develop and deliver improvements to our everyday life. With smartphones becoming more accessible and used by people of all ages, it’s easier to stay connected and to reap the benefits provided by the local community and businesses. Enhance your quality of your life with a few simple apps that can make a big difference to your everyday. Here are top 7 apps that will make your life easier and everyday more fulfilling.

  1. CalorieDetails.com

It has never been more important than now to get and be healthy. For many of us, it is tough to know what truly is in the foods we eat. CalorieDetails.com has a food database of over 1 million foods to help you to know what is in the food you are eating. Check it out to see how many calories, fat, carbs, protein, and more are in the foods you are eating. read more

Top 7 Video Editing Software For Beginners

Creating video content can become a huge passion for some, and even a career path too. But, to get that far, you have to start somewhere. Within any job, people start at a beginner stage in order to train, learn and work their way up to the top.

This is the same when becoming a video editor. Whether it be for a high-end company or the editing of your own videos, you will still start as a beginner and need to learn your way around a quality workstation software in order to produce reputable final outcomes. read more

4 Ways Students Can Use Technology in their Education

The great thing about being a student in the modern, technology focused world is that you can use technology to help you learn and grow. There are a ton of tools, both free and paid, that can help in your education. This post looks at a few ways you can use technology to help you learn.

Note Taking Apps

In the past, you had to write down your notes in a notebook. However, now, you can use a note taking app to assist you take and keep better notes. One of the top apps for taking notes is Evernote. With a note taking app like evernote, these notes are easy to take and organize and they are available anywhere you have a connection to the Internet. You can even use most note taking apps to setup to-do lists and calendar reminders.

Recording Software

Another super helpful tool that you can use to help your education is recording software. One such product is the =&0=&. With a screen recorder, you can record and any webinars or online presentations to review at a later time. The recording is super quick and easy with Movavi’s straightforward record/stop/pause/etc controls. In addition, you may want to be mindful of the device that you are using. Whether it’s an Android phone, an iPhone, or a PC, every device has its own set of settings. For example, you can check out this link for https://www.loom.com/blog/how-to-record-your-screen-on-iphone for details on how to record a screen on an iPhone.

Using Google Docs to Collaborate

In the past, working on a team project often meant meeting and working on Word document or Excel sheet together. Team projects have been made much easier by online tools like Google Docs and Sheets. With Google Docs, any member of a project team can view or edit the files from anywhere at anytime. You can also see the history of changes to a document to see who is adding what. This can save everyone time and let members work on the project when they have time available.

Video Meetings

Whether working on a project or just working on homework, it is helpful to be able to work with other classmates face to face. Tools like Google hangouts and Skype make it easy to work with others from anywhere. Many of these tools let you share your screen if you have something you are working on together. Also, combining tools like Google Docs and Google Hangouts makes it almost like the team is in the room together!

These are just a few ways technology has made it easier for students. Know of another way? Let me know in the comments!

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Here’s How Today’s Small Businesses Are Managing Their Inventory

What is the best way to manage your inventory? Is it through sage stock control software? Through old-fashioned pen and paper? Can you manage your inventory through spreadsheets? The first step to answering these questions is to know what your options are. Let’s take a look at four of the most common solutions today’s small businesses are using to manage their inventory. Then you can choose which one is a good fit for your company.

Handwritten Notes and Excel Spreadsheets

In 2015, Capterra noted that 46 percent of small and medium-size businesses either use a manual inventory management system or none at all to keep track of their parts and products. There’s a good reason why this number is so high. Most companies start out with an informal inventory management system, and they are neither ready nor on the lookout for anything in-depth.

Handwritten notes and Excel spreadsheets are the most popular manual tools SMBs use when they go this route. Practically every PC has some version of the Microsoft Office suite on it, so it makes sense that companies would take advantage of it to help them manage their inventory.

But both of these solutions have major flaws. Pieces of paper can be lost, smudged, destroyed, or stolen. There’s no audit trail in Excel to see who made which changes to a spreadsheet. Plus, if the employee who set up the manual inventory system ever leaves the company, he will most likely fail to leave behind documentation of how he set it up, which will create a big challenge for his replacement to figure it out and keep it going.

There’s got to be a better option. As it turns out, there are two significantly better ones: inventory apps and desktop inventory management software.

Inventory Apps

With any luck, the percent of SMBs using manual systems to manage inventory has decreased significantly in the last four years. There’s no reason to rely on pieces of paper or Excel spreadsheets when there are plenty of free apps and online solutions available. A big reason why SMBs are not making use of these free tools that can help them improve efficiency is because they don’t know they exist.

Boxstorm Forever Free is the first no-cost, cloud-based inventory management solution to integrate with QuickBooks Online. SMBs can use it to create items, change their quantities, scan items in and out, create multiple locations and units of measure, transfer inventory from one location to another, cycle count, import and export data in batches via CSV files, and view audit trails.

As companies grow and they want to do more things with their online inventory management solution, they can move on to more advanced versions of Boxstorm. Sales orders, purchase orders, payments, tax calculations, user permissions, stock alerts, and tracking criteria are found in the other Boxstorm versions.

Desktop Inventory Management Software

If an app isn’t sufficient for SMBs, they have the option to use desktop inventory management software. This is especially helpful if they want to gain access to more in-depth manufacturing and warehouse management features. So far, cloud-based solutions haven’t been able to match desktop software’s breadth of functionality, so many companies still use it.

Fishbowl has been the #1 selling manufacturing and warehouse management software for QuickBooks since 2004. QuickBooks users often make use of the accounting software’s inventory management features, but they usually find that they can’t handle their increasingly complex requirements. Instead of opting for an ERP or other expensive option, they can choose an inventory management solution like Fishbowl that integrates with QuickBooks to continue using the accounting software while adding inventory control tools.

Of course, that being said, at some stage in the growth of your business, working with a team of accountants is almost always going to be necessary. Especially with regards to ensuring that your taxes are up to date for example.

Put simply though, Fishbowl goes beyond Boxstorm’s features to let companies use multi-currency conversions in sales orders and purchase orders, integrate with dozens of other business solutions, generate work orders and bills of materials, use production stages, and more.

Looking Forward

That’s how today’s small businesses are managing their inventory. As we noted at the start, you can decide which of these options is best for your business. You can keep things informal with a manual system, add automation with the aid of a free inventory app, or implement a desktop solution to gain access to the most features. Maintenance of annual accounts, bookkeeping, and affordable tax solutions are some of the services provided by companies like them.

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5 Basic Things All iOS App Developers Know

Over the course of the last 5 years, Apple has grown its magnitude tremendously. In February 2018, the company’s CEO has issued a press release informing that Apple has distributed over 1.3 billion devices. During the first quarter alone, the company has sold over 95 million devices – 77 million of these were iPhones.

This popularity leads developers to one conclusion – the demand for mobile app design will grow as well. With Google no longer endorsing Android, ecommerce business owners have to re-evaluate their priorities and consider investing in iOS app programming.

There are a lot of iOS developer jobs candidates on the market right now. As a business owner, you might struggle to separate skilled professionals from wannabes. To fish out the best talent from the tech talent pool, you have to know which skills are must-haves in the world of apps before you make a new hire.

If you’re an app developer yourself (especially, a self-educated one), you would benefit a great deal from knowing what skills are necessary to master if you want to come across as the one that knows how to make a mobile app.

In the post, we’ve gathered 5 basic things a junior mobile app developer should get the hang of.

Skill #1. Fluency in Swift or Objective-C

The first step of the professional way of any iOS developer is choosing a primary language – the one you’ll use to perform 99,9% of your projects.

The most common choice is between Swift and Objective-C. Quite possibly, if you’re reading this, you have already meddled with either one or the other. However, we’ll still break down the main differences between the two.

Swift was developed as a replacement for Objective-C. In a way, it has a handful of advantages over the older language: such as the introduction of type safety, advanced string manipulation, or the guard feature that makes the code times more readable.

On the other hand, ObC is more dynamic language comparing to Swift which still makes it the superior one.

While most developers are inclined to think that the future lies in Swift, the choice of iOS programming language is still up to you. There are a few other programming languages to consider – discover this info here. The only thing that’s important is sticking to your primary language to master it in the best way possible.

Skill #2. Good command of MVC

Model-View-Controller is one of the fundamentals of Objective-C programming. Apple chose this pattern as a cornerstone of their apps architecture for a reason. First of all, it allowed a smooth transition from macOS to iOS once the latter has been introduced.

It aligns well with the other goal of for iOS mobile app development – simplicity. After all, it’s exactly what Apple aspires to – making the early stages of development highly manageable.

Here are a few basic things you can do within the framework:

  • Reuse and reconfigure View objects;
  • Responding to action and delegation messages and managing the cycle of “owned” objects;
  • Passing data from Model to Controllers;

Skill #3. Experience with Unit Testing

A major part of iOS apps didn’t go anywhere near unit testing. That’s understandable – the costs of using the method are sometimes too high. After it’s been unit-tested, a code will lose in readability which something a team of developers can’t afford (it’s important that your code is clear for an IT project manager).

However, at a more than few instances in iOS mobile development when you do have to unit test your apps. To name but a few:

  • Apps that are developed on data-based logic. If a feature is supposed to be activated after some time, it won’t be easy to test manually. With a unit test, you can be sure new features will be launched when you’ve planned them to.
  • It makes sense to unit test apps if manually testing the condition would take a lot of hours.
  • You need to test a rare condition. Rather than messing with the original code to see if what you planned appears, it’d be smarter to unit test the condition.
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