What’s New In Android L, Windows 8.1 And IOS 8

As all the three major mobile players in smartphone categories  i.e. Apple, Google and Microsoft come up with their latest version of Operating Systems i.e. iOS 8, Android L & Windows 8.1 respectively. Let’s have a look how it is worthy for users to switch over the most-recent OS version based upon the new features.

Android L:-

  • Personalized unlocking features, which make your smartphone or tablet search for familiar Bluetooth’s gadgets, Wi-Fi networks, locations and even voice imprints to deactivate any lock screen protections, letting you jump straight into your phone when it knows you’re nearby. If the device can’t detect any of this metrics, anyone trying to use it will be presented with the standard lock screen.
  • Google is focusing on its stock android keyboard for Android 5.0 Lollipop for adding more personalized and scrapping the individual tiled keys.
  • There is one more exciting feature i.e. “Do Not Disturb mode”, which automatically deactivates all notifications and audio during set times, support for Bluetooth 4.1 and a completely redesigned audio back end with support for USB audio devices.
  • Also Android L is going to introduce 64-bit processor support and  improving battery life with Project Volta. Project Volta includes a new battery historian which will help users work out what a device was doing at any given point in a battery cycle to find out which apps are draining the most power.

Windows 8.1 :–

Microsoft has already rolled out windows 8.1 few months back. Some of the features that were added windows phone 8.1:

  • Cortana, which is very much similar to Siri in iOS device, act as your personal assistant. Cortana notebook features store things that you tell her about yourself and also keep tracks what you like and what you’d like done. It can access apps, set alarms, send messages to specific persons, post a Facebook status, add a tweet, search for something and a lot more.
  • The action center which is finally added, and here you can get all your notifications and other controls such as setting Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.
  • Another interesting feature that added to windows 8.1 was Quiet Hours. Here You can set what time you want your phone to be “quiet,” shutting out noise or notifications coming from it.

There is some other new features like setting up your personal photos as the background on the said start screen, connects you to free Wi-Fi hotspots near you through Wi-Fi sense, transferring files from the internal memory and SD-card seamless through Storage Sence etc.

iOS 8:-

iOS 8 also launched with lots of new features and here I am going to share few of them:

  • iPhone has new feature “Send Last Location” which allows your iPhone (or iPad) to send its last-known location to Apple when the battery drains to a critical level. If you lost your device, it will help you to find the last location of your device even if it’s battery is completely drained.
  • You can now include photos when making notes, to-do lists and reminders in Apple’s iOS 8 notes app.
  • Now iPhone can identify the song due to Shazam integration in Siri. If you ask Siri, “What song is playing?”, it will cause her to listen to the ambient sound, using Shazam to identify music.
  • You can notice iOS 8 has new keyboard with a very smooth predictive type features, which suggests three words right above the keyboard.

I hope you liked this post. What you would like to prefer- Android L, iOS 8 or windows 8.1 and why. Please share your answer in the below comment section

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Utility Open Source Apps In CakePHP That You Need To Know

CakePHP is one of the most popular open source web application framework. It provides an extensible architecture for development, maintenance and deployment of PHP applications. Being based on the MVC Architecture & ORM, it is relatively simple to understand and helps developers to write less code without losing flexibility.

The key features of Open Source Apps written in CakePHP are:

  • Flexible Licensing
  • Works from any Website Directory, with Little Number of Apache Configuration involved
  • Integrated CRUD for Database Interaction
  • Code Generation & Built-in Validation
  • Request Dispatcher with Clean, Custom URLs and Routes
  • Fast and Flexible Templating (PHP Syntax with Helpers)
  • View Helpers for AJAX, JavaScript, HTML Forms and much more
  • Email, Cookie, Security, Session and Request Handling Components
  • Flexible ACL and Data Sanitization
  • Flexible Caching and Localization

CakePHP has the second largest active developer team and community among the PHP frameworks, bringing great value to the project. It keeps you away from reinventing the wheel.

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Github is the #1 resource for Cakephp projects in my opinion. 2nd place probably is occupied by Code Google and then comes Sourceforge.

Orangescrum

Orangescrum is a flexible project management web application developed using CakePHP framework. It’s an efficient Project Collaboration Tool that gives you full visibility and control over your projects. Orangescrum offers all the basic features you need for smooth running of your project. No matter where you are globally, with Orangescrum you feel like sitting next to your developer. With an intuitive interfaces, easy-to-use functionality, you organize your project activities to a great extent.

Disclaimer: It’s our own project management tool.

https://github.com/Orangescrum/orangescrum

Croogo

Croogo is a free, open source, Multilingual Content management system built using CakePHP MVC framework. It’s an open source project released under MIT License. With Croogo CMS, you can create your own content type such as blog, node, page, etc.  Also you can categorize content with Taxonomy and it also offers WYSIWYG editor to edit content directly from browser.

Zhen CRM

Zhen CRM is a self-hosted CRM with full source code (in CakePHP and MySQL) that aims to be visually easy to use, simple and straightforward, and provides all the features you need from a full-featured CRM!

Vamcart

Vamcart is a CakePHP based open source Shopping cart. It is easy to use and simple to install. It is not required to have any special knowledge to install Vamcart on your server. Just download the files from vamcart homepage and put them on your server’s root directory and open Vamcart installation page directly from the browser. The script will automatically install shopping cart on your site.

QuickApps

QuickApps is a CakePHP based open source Content management system. It is easy to use and simple to install. It allows developers and advanced users to easily build complex websites without reinventing the wheel.

 

Recommended Blog: Containable Behavior in CakePHP

Definitely, this list is incomplete. Share your favorite open source CakePHP application with us in the comments below.

WCF or ASP.NET Web API: Which one to choose?

Everybody provides API’s to consume these days. Some of the most popular ones are Facebook, Twitter, Google, Github and the list goes on.

API which build services can be consumed by a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices.

In Microsoft platform API can be created by using couple of technologies and they are WCF AND ASP.NET Web API.

Here I am discussing about the major differences between above two technologies.

wcf-vs-web_v_3

Advantages of Web API  over WCF:

  • Excellent programming model for HTTP.
  • More suitable for access from various browsers, mobile devices etc. enabling wide reach.
  • Enables building APIs that support wide variety of media types including XML, JSON etc.
  • Uses basic protocol and formats such as HTTP, WebSockets, SSL, JQuery, JSON, and XML.
  • HTTP is request/response but additional patterns can be supported through SignalR and WebSockets integration.
  • There is a variety of ways to describe a Web API ranging from auto-generated HTML help page describing code snippets to structured metadata for OData integrated APIs.
  • It is nearly attribute-less and uses convention over configuration to minimize the amount of configuration needed
  • It supports testing well in comparison to WCF infrastructure
  • Web API embraces HTTP’s full goodness such as client-server architecture, web caching, resources, hypermedia, etc.

Advantages of WCF  over Web API:

  • It enables building services that supports multiple transport protocols like HTTP, TCP, UDP, and custom transports
  • Allows switching between multiple transport protocols
  • Enables building services that support multiple encodings (Text, MTOM, and Binary) of the same message type and allows switching between them.
  • Supports building services with WS-* standards like Reliable Messaging, Transactions, Message Security.
  • Supports Request-Reply, One Way, and Duplex message exchange patterns.
  • WCF SOAP services can be described in WSDL allowing automated tools to generate client proxies even for services with complex schemas.

Conclusion:

If you required to use RPC and want to implement enterprise based implementation, then WCF is fine but if you need an API serving all kind of devices Web API is superior.

If you want to move over from HTTP to some other transport, say TCP, NetTCP, MSMQ then WCF will be a better option.

So if we are starting anything from scratch then choose Web API but if you have already have an enterprise WCF app then stick to it.

Recommended Blog: Comparison between ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET Web Forms