Sunday, July 31, 2016

Two New Google Apps That Will Blow Up Your Mind


Google announced two new applications Allo and Duo at Google I/O on May 18, 2016. These Apps are due to be released in the summer 2016 and would be available for free on both Android and iOS . By the time being you all can Pre-register the apps so that you can recieve notifications on your device when the apps are released.

Allo - Smart Messaging App

Allo(prounced like "Aloe") a smart messaging app that has Google Assistant built-in . It helps to make your conversations more easier and expressive. You will signup with your phone number and contact to anyone in your phonebook.



Allo has all new features which differentiate it from the other messaging apps.So, first starting with "Whisper Shout" which means you can enlarge or shrink the size of the text easily by holding the send button and then drag your finger up and down .Allo app also consists of stickers and emojis like other messaging apps.


It has feature "Ink" which means that get creative with the photos you send by doodling on them.
The coolest feature of Allo app is "Smart Reply"that means you can respond to messages without typing a single word.Smart Reply learns over time and will show suggestions that are in your style. For example, it will learn whether you’re more of a “haha” vs. “lol” kind of person.It also works same for the photos as well. Suppose for example, your friend send you photo of her new born baby.When she sends you the message, Allo puts some suggested replies at the bottom which are called suggestion chips.



Google builds up these suggestion chips based on the machine learning it can apply to the way that you actually type.In the above example, the suggestion chips would be "Aww So Cute" or "Congratulations".It helps you to keep the conversation going.



There's also an Incognito Mode — similar to Incognito Mode on Chrome. When you enable it, your conversation is encrypted end-to-end and Google can't read it at all. And notifications from Incognito chats don't reveal their contents on your lock screen.


To pre-register allo app - Click Here

Duo - Video Calling App

Duo is the fastest and simplest video calling app for both Android and iOS. Like Allo, Duo is based on your phone number, allowing you to reach anyone in your phonebook.
Duo dynamically adjusts the video and audio quality to suit whatever connection you're on. To reduce the latency on the video it uses WebRTC.
You can also switch between wifi to cellular or vice-versa without dropping a call.
 The most amazing feature of Duo app is "Knock Knock", which shows you a live video preview of the caller before you pick up. Once you answer, it gets you right into video call immediately. Isn't it the coolest feature that we were waiting to have in our video calling apps.


To pre-register Duo video calling app - Click Here

Thursday, July 28, 2016

First-Ever Google Play Awards-Google I/O 2016



Google livestream first-ever Google Play Awards for Apps and Games during its annual developer conference, the Google I/O in May.There were 10 award categories in which five nominees were shortlisted and the criteria for selection relies on the quality of the app, innovative features and released a major update in the past year. The winners were selected by the Google Play team itself.

1) Standout Startup: Nominees

          Dubsmash                 Hopper                     Musical.ly                 Robinhood                      Vrse

Winner: Hopper

Hopper is a mobile application that uses big data to predict and analyze airfare. Hopper provides travelers with the information they need to get the best deals on flights, and notifies them when prices for their flights are at their predicted lowest points. Hopper was founded in 2007, is based in Cambridge and Montreal, and is backed by Brightspark, Accomplice, OMERS Ventures, and BDC Capital IT Venture Fund.

2) Standout Indie: Nominees


        Alphabear          Alto’s Adventure     Fast like a Fox   Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector      Prune

Winner: Alphabear


Alphabear is an original word puzzle game by Spry Fox, the developer of the award winning game Triple Town.
In Alphabear, you spell words by selecting letters on a grid. When you use letters that are adjacent to each other, bears appear! The more letters you use, the bigger the bear gets, and the more points you earn!

3) Best Families App: Nominees


  Card Wars - Adventure     LEGO Jurassic World™     My Very Hungry             Thinkrolls 2                   Toca Nature
                  Time                                                                            Caterpillar

Winner: Thinkrolls 2


Thinkrolls 2 is an enlightening logic puzzler for kids 3-9 years old. Take pride in your children's achievements, as they sharpen their minds and solve increasingly challenging puzzles, all while having fun! It is molding the next generation of scientific geniuses and will have the whole family enthralled.

4) Best Use of Material Design: Nominees



            Bring!                 Robinhood             The Fabulous               Todoist                      Vevo

Winner: Robinhood


Robinhood for Android is a free download that allows people to buy and sell stocks for free! View market data in real-time, build a personalized watchlist, and place trades with a few taps. You don't have to pay a commission on buying and selling stocks, unlike with other services

5) Best Use Of Google Play Game Services: Nominees


        Sea Battle 2       Table Tennis Touch         Tapventures          TowerMadness 2     Zombie Highway2

Winner: Table Tennis Touch


Table Tennis Touch is a table tennis video game developed by Yakuto. It was originally released for iOS on May 15, 2014. An Android release followed on March 11, 2015.
If you like table tennis, you'll love Table Tennis Touch. Stunning graphics, intuitive swipe controls, realistic high speed gameplay and multiple game modes have made Table Tennis Touch the world's #1 table tennis game.

6) Early Adopter: Nominees


             Glide             Mechanic Escape  Minecraft: Story Mode   World Around Me          Zumper

Winner: World Around Me


World Around Me is a unique way to find useful places around you - such as restaurants, ATMs, shops, bus/metro stations and more. WAM uses your phone’s camera to give you a completely new way of exploring a place, anywhere in the world.

7) Go Global: Nominees


   Dragon Ball Z Dokkan    Freeletics Bodyweight           Memrise                       Musixmatch                Pokรฉmon Shuffle 
             Battle                                                                                                                                     Mobile                                                                    

Winner: Pokรฉmon Shuffle Mobile                       


You can play it casually—but battling, collecting, and leveling up Pokรฉmon can also provide hours of fun.Pokรฉmon Shuffle Mobile is a puzzle game where you line up three or more Pokรฉmon vertically or horizontally to battle against wild Pokรฉmon.

8) Most Innovative: Nominees


      Fast like a Fox               NYT VR                  SmartNews              The Fabulous         This War of Mine

Winner: NYT VR


 NYT VR has daily virtual reality video stories from the New York Times, presenting news in a more immersive way.Users of the NYT VR app can use Google Cardboard to go inside the news. Or for those who don’t subscribe to the NYT you can still use the app to view interactive videos.

9) Best App: Nominees


    BuzzFeed News              Colorfy                       Houzz                   TuneIn Radio                Yummly

Winner: Houzz


Whether you’re looking to renovate or redecorate, Houzz has everything you need to improve your home. Get inspired with over ten million high-resolution photos of home interiors and exteriors that you can browse by style, room and location, save and share. Connect with over one million active home improvement professionals, from architects to contractors to designers and more, who can make your dream home a reality; and shop millions of products to complete your projects. 

10) Best Game: Nominees


     Alphabear         Clash of Kings     Clash Royale   MARVEL Future           Star Wars
                                                                                                Fight

Winner: Clash Royale


Supercell is known for its Clash of Clans game, and now Google is giving the company props for its Clash Royale game.
Clash Royale looks and feels like a spin-off of the Clans before it. Here players battle one another in real time using a series of strategic cards. Those cards offer different types of troops you can march into battle, and if you’re good enough, come out victorious on the other side. It's very different from the base building of Clash of Clans.

Watch Full Google Play Awards - Google I/O 2016


Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Top 20 Everyday Tools For UX Designers



1.Usability Tools


 Was created by User Experience Designers fed up with web testing apps providing partial solutions. This one of the most widely used UX design tools that have gained immense popularity among designers and marketers due to its powerful features. This tool helps to analyze a web page from the perspective of a user. This is a huge advantage for a designer as he gets to know where he needs to make changes to increase conversion or which elements need to be repositioned to be able to facilitate certain actions. Usability Tools allows you to get direct feedback from people who are actually using the product.

2.MouseStats


MouseStats is hosted web service for website designers and startups to provides professional website heatmaps and visitor activity analysis by tracking visitors' mouse moves, clicks, and scorlls to increase conversion rates and maximize ROI.

3.Attensee


It measures where people pay attention. It mimics eye-tracking but does so without any extra hardware or invasive special equipment. The Attensee interface is as natural as using any web-browser. People use the mouse pointer to bring one part of the screen into clarity, and it updates in real time as they change their area of focus. Users naturally decide what to look at and where to look next and the web based software simulates focal and peripheral vision as they do. With it, you can measure people's engagement with the page content. Rich data is produced that allowing you to understand what draws and holds people's attention in the online world in a way that is scalable, cost effective, and reliable.

4.Appsee


It was founded in 2012 and based in Tel Aviv. Appsee is being used by hundreds of companies that leverage our SaaS plarform to optimize their mobile apps. Their customers include companies from a wide range of industries such as travel, news, gaming and real estate.

5.UserVoice



It creates simple customer engagement tools that help companies understand and interact with their customers more positively and build customer relationships that last. With more than 90,000 organizations signed up and thousands of customers, UserVoice products include:

UserVoice Feedback - a hosted tool for gathering and prioritizing product ideas directly from a company's customers.
UserVoice Helpdesk - a simple-to-use ticketing system that helps companies solve more customer issues in less time.
UserVoice Full Service - a complete customer service solution that bundles Feedback and Helpdesk into a single, easy-to-manage environment.

6.Ehn.io


It  is an research recruiting tool for intercepting people that use your interface from your web site or app, and then conducting some kind of research with them - moderated or automated - and scheduling them or paying them incentives automatically if you'd like. You can also email or tweet or post a link to an ethnio screener, but most people place our JavaScript on their site. Ethnio is not a recruiting agency or research consulting firm.

7.Polldaddy


It is a service that provides polling widgets for blogs, websites, and social networks. PollDaddy has recently entered a partnership with Piczo to provide poll services to their 30 million users. Piczo users now have our entire poll making facilities built right into their Piczo profile editor. Apart from basic polls, PollDaddy aims to provide a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. PollDaddy distributes a new online survey tool and a more generic form generator that is capable of making contact forms. 

8.Solidify



It is an online platform that enables users to build prototype interface screens with sketches, wireframes, and mockups. Users can validate users flows on any device by performing user tests in person, remotely or on their testers own time to get feedback.
Solidify is made by ZURB, a product design company located in Campbell, California. It  put over 10 years of experience building web productsservices & websites into this product.

9.POP


It transforms sketches into click-through prototypes in minutes.
Design wireframes on paper. Pen & paper are the best tools. Import your sketches by taking a picture. Create a storyboard by linking your sketches together with "link spots". Press play and simulate your user interface to make sure everything flows correctly.
Share your prototype with colleagues and friends. They can try out your prototype in any device. You’d be surprised how valuable their feedback can be.

10.UXPin


It is a product design platform that allows product and design teams to easily design, collaborate on, and present both high- and low-fidelity, fully-interactive wireframes and prototypesSay goodbye to old-school wireframing and prototyping tools that only do one step of the product design process and don't allow you to use your existing design work, whether it was produced in Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch or elsewhere. UXPin let's you take products from concept to beautiful, pixel-perfect prototypes without any compromise.


11.Proto.io



It is a silly-fast way to create fully interactive mobile app prototypes. Launched in 2011 and designed specifically for mobile, Proto.io can simulate everything an app can do. That includes interactive touch gestures, screen transitions and animations. It is perhaps the only mobile prototyping tool that allows users to create realistic, sharable prototypes that work as a real app should and experience their prototype on the actual device. It is 100% web-based and offers a familiar and intuitive drag-and-drop User Interface, with no coding required.


12.PowerMockup

It is an add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint with hundreds of templates for user interface controls and icons. Creating a wireframe with PowerMockup is easy; simply select the controls you need from the library pane and drop them onto your PowerPoint slide.

13.Balsamiq


Founded in March 2008, Balsamiq Studios aims to make the world a better place by helping people create software that is easier to use. Balsamiq is a wireframing and mockup tool that allows users to sketch and share user interface mockups for web, desktop and mobile apps.
It is a small group of passionate individuals who believe work should be fun and that life is too short for bad software.

14.Pidoco

The pidoco usability software helps you develop better web and other software applications. Improve the usability of your applications using early user tests and utilize the potential of an excellent user experience to get your customers excited and drive up your revenues. Lower project risks, time to market, and coordination and development costs using real-time collaborative rapid prototyping.

15.Memosort


Distance will no longer be a barrier thanks to Memosort. This amazing tool helps you connect with you team and collaborate in real time. It comes with ‘Virtual Labels’ and ‘Post-Its’ and that means, when the work is done, you have the peace of mind that the workplace is not littered with Sticky Notes. Since everything gets auto-saved in Memosort, you can focus on brainstorming.

16.InVision


It is an interesting mix of a collaboration and prototyping tool. With it, you will be able to create interactive and interesting prototypes. Real time collaboration is also possible with Invision. All you need to do is to send a link of the design to other members of the team and they will be able to work on it.

17.Mural.ly


It is a platform allowing its users to aggregate web content and display them in a bulletin board-like customizable space.Mural.ly is a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based innovative platform to create murals of content. Available for free, the platform allows users to aggregate links and other web content (including images, embedded video, links, and social media content) and displays them in a customizable space that resembles a physical bulletin board or wall. It also serves as a social network for ideators who can co-create murals and learn more about each other's personal interests or business ideas.

18.Prevue


It is a simple tool that enables design agencies and freelance designers to upload their work, and share it with their clients. It’s core purpose is to take the pain out of presenting designs, and facilitates quick and painless feedback. It's what your clients need: no logins, technical knowledge or fancy modern browsers required.
Simple and elegant both in functionality and design, Prevue comes with the core features agencies want — like team sharing, security and custom branding.

19.Cage


Cage is an online collaboration tool that provides a secure environment for creative teams in web, mobile, print, video, design, 3D and motion graphics to easily present their work for feedback and approval. It also provides clients a simple, intuitive venue for offering direction in real-time on an actual creative asset.
It is currently being used by designers at: Omnicom, HGTV, DIY Network, Google, BBDO, Twitter, Facebook, Saatchi & Saatchi, Target, IGN, Living Social, The Verge, IDEO, AT&T, Virgin Media, Moleskin, Marvel, Electronic Arts, Walmart, Intermedia Outdoors, Ogilvy and Weber Shandwick.

20.StoryboardThat


Communication is a critical part of most knowledge workers' jobs. By creating a fun tool to improve how people communicate, it strive to do the world a service and make it a better place.It truly believe that by making it easier for people to describe ideas, user flows, basic processes, and anything else they want, people will be more willing to spend the time to do it. By making the descriptions (Storyboards) so easy to consume, people will want to share them and iterate over ideas. As this increases innovation, it makes everyone happier and more productive.
Storyboard that leverages the power of storytelling in the work place with visual communication by providing a fast and fun web based tool.


So, these are some UX design tools that are helping web designers to build a better web.

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