roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program games and play games created by other users. Created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua. For most of Roblox’s history, it was relatively small, both as a platform and a company. Roblox began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s, and this growth has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.[7][8]

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

Roblox is free to play, with in-game purchases available through a virtual currency called Robux. As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16.[9][10]

Although Roblox has received generally positive reviews from critics, it has faced criticism for its moderation, microtransactions, and alleged exploitative practices directed toward children.

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Software

What is Roblox? Why is everyone talking about Roblox?

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

WHAT IS ROBLOX?

Roblox is an online platform and storefront where users go to play games. Roblox is not a game, it is a place where people play games made by other developers. In this sense, it is more similar to PC platform Steam than it is to any online children’s game.
What makes Roblox different from anything else in the games industry — including a storefront like Steam — is that all the games are made by its users. On Roblox, the fun doesn’t just come from playing games, it also comes from making games. These games are not formally developed by Roblox Corporation, but by users of the platform. Currently, the official website boasts that its users have published over 20 million games on the platform.

ROBLOX LETS DEVELOPERS FOCUS ON GAMEPLAY

Build Once, Play Anywhere

Maintain a single codebase that works seamlessly across every platform Roblox supports. Immediately ship your projects on phones, desktops, consoles, and VR with a single click.

Real-Time Social Ecosystem

Roblox isn’t just a game engine. With Roblox’s uniquely inherent social ecosystem, it’s easier than ever for developers to leverage network effects and achieve viral growth.

Reach an Engaged Global Community

As one of the top online entertainment platforms for audiences under the age of 18 (Comscore), players enjoy more than a billion hours of engagement on Roblox each month.

Fully Managed Infrastructure

Roblox’s proprietary, fully-managed cloud software and infrastructure removes complexity from multi-player gameplay, game updates, scaling, matchmaking, and monetization.

roblox development in johor bahru malaysia

IS ROBLOX SAFE FOR KIDS?

Common Sense Media rates the platform OK for users 13+ “based on continuing challenges with problematic content, but it’s potentially OK for kids younger than that if account restrictions are turned on and parents pay close attention to their kids’ activities on the platform.”

Roblox notes that the platform was designed for kids and teens from the beginning and they’re committed to making safety a priority. “We have a responsibility to make sure our players can learn, create, and play safely,” notes Tami Bhaumik, VP of Digital Civility, Roblox. “This continues to be our most important priority and that will never change.”

She adds that the company has a human review team monitoring for safety in multiple languages and keeping an eye out for chat behavior that clearly indicates an attempt to bring a player off our platform to other, less restrictive third-party chat apps, and for users under 13, filters are even stricter, such as blocking all use of numbers and potentially personal identifiable information. The platform also do not allow the sending of images or video via chat or one-to-one user interactions.

You can also stay on top of what Roblox is doing to evolve their safety system via regular updates and their Parents Guide

Roblox is a safe gaming platform for kids when parents take the recommendations from our experts seriously. Making it a rule that kids play Roblox in a shared family space where you can supervise their activity is the best way to ensure their safety.

ROBLOX GAME DEVELOPMENT DEMO

What is Flutter?

What is Flutter?

What is Flutter?

What is Flutter?

What is Flutter?

Fast Development

Paint your app to life in milliseconds with Stateful Hot Reload. Use a rich set of fully-customizable widgets to build native interfaces in minutes.

Expressive and Flexible UI

Quickly ship features with a focus on native end-user experiences. Layered architecture allows for full customization, which results in incredibly fast rendering and expressive and flexible designs.

Native Performance

Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts, and your Flutter code is compiled to native ARM machine code using Dart’s native compilers.

Pros & Cons of Native Applications
When it comes to native versus cross-platform and making a choice, it is paramount to learn about the pros and cons of each of these frameworks. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of native applications first.

Pros of Native App Development
High Performance
Native built apps offer extremely high performance in terms of speed, responsiveness and operational efficiency. This is possible as these platform specific apps are programmed using core programming languages and APIs. Moreover, they are able to leverage the device’s processing speed to its full potential, hence ensuring lower load time.

Broad Functionality
As highlighted earlier, the biggest advantage of native over cross platform is the former’s ability to access all the features of the platform it is made for. This ultimately results in faster execution & better user experience. Additionally, native apps can function without internet connectivity making it the best solution for complex mobile applications.

Ultimate UI/UX
To create apps with robust and intuitive user experience and consistent look and feel, native technology is your best bet. Developed using native software development kits (SDKs) and destined for a particular operating system, native mobile apps deliver a more natural flow to its users.

Moreover, sticking to specific guidelines allows familiar actions & gestures for users and maintaining aspect ratio ensures better visuals and better control over the user interface.

Higher Security and Reliability
Native apps are better poised to provide protection against security violations over cross-platform apps. How? Native apps are programmed using the core language of the platform, which makes them more secure and reliable.

Also, features such as proactive security upgrades, multi-factor authentication and remote management controls ensure the strictest data security and privacy.

Store’s Support
It is easier to launch native apps in the app store as they comply with iOS and Android guidelines by default. Native is considered to be preferred both by Google & Apple as they mostly feature native apps on their store. And ofcourse, getting featured on an app store reinforces your brand and gives your downloads a quantum jump.

Cons of Native App Development
High Cost
The biggest drawback of Native development is its cost. There are two primary reasons for this high cost – first, native app development is complex due to which professional development and support consumes a lion’s share of the project budget. Note that, native mobile developers are more expensive compared to cross-platform ones. Second, in order to cater to two different sets of audiences i.e., Android and iOS, it requires two distinct native apps, leading to setting up two development teams, and ultimately soaring the total cost.

Difficulties with Updates and Maintenance
Maintaining separate builds for separate platforms that require regular maintenance & support is challenging. You may face difficulty in collaborating several teams or in rolling out feature updates or new features.

Slow Development Speed
The speed of development is yet another downside of mobile native vs. cross-platform app. It consumes significantly more time to develop a native app than its cross-platform counterpart does. There’s also no chance to repurpose the native code of one operating system for another, resulting in slower development.

What is Cross-platform app development?
Cross-platform app development provides you the flexibility of building mobile applications using a universal language, making this single app compatible with more than one mobile platforms. The key advantage of cross-platform is code reusability, thereby simplifying the entire development process.

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Software

What is Flutter? Why use it?

what is flutter mobile app development in malaysia

What kinds of apps can I build with Flutter?

Flutter is Google’s open source technology for creating mobile, desktop, and web apps with a single codebase. Unlike other popular solutions, Flutter is not a framework or library; it’s a complete SDK – software development kit. Let’s briefly clarify it here to make sure we’re on the same page.
Originally, Flutter was designed as a mobile-focused SDK for creating native Android and iOS apps with a single codebase. However, Google has been hard at work developing and refining its brainchild, and now, with their last major upgrade came the long-promised capability to build apps for virtually any platform. Here’s what the official announcement states:

Reduced Code Development Time

From my experience, building a usual mid-size Android app takes at least 40 seconds to get shipped onto the test device. And sometimes, it can take forever just to adjust a small visual aspect in the layout. Some of you might say, ‘Wait, but Android Studio has a layout preview for that.’ And it does. Yet, of course, there is a but: the feature is limited and doesn’t always work as expected, especially with custom views.

Flutter’s “hot reload” feature, in turn, allows seeing the applied changes almost instantly, without even losing the current application state. And this is exactly what makes Flutter app development several times faster due to the increased development speed.

Besides, the Flutter team has put lots of effort into providing a wide variety of ready-to-use widgets. Most of them are incredibly customizable, saving your time like no other framework before. In addition to numerous core layout widgets, Flutter provides a large set of Material and Cupertino widgets that perfectly mimic the behavior of each design language. Here’s how they work:

what is flutter mobile app development in malaysia
Altogether, you skip several crazily time-consuming steps in app development when using Flutter, which makes the entire process faster, simpler and less worrisome.

Increased Time-to-Market Speed

This one is pretty straightforward. Flutter development framework functions quicker than its alternatives. In most cases, you can expect a Flutter app to require at least two times fewer man-hours compared to the same app developed separately for Android and iOS. The main reason is dead simple: you just don’t have to write any platform-specific code to achieve the desired visuals in your application. Any 2D-based UI can be implemented in Flutter without interacting with a native application counterpart.

Aside from that, Flutter provides a declarative API for building UI, which, in my experience, noticeably boosts the performance. This is most obvious when it comes to visual adjustments. Read also: Choosing a Map API for Your Next App

So Why Try Flutter?

Let’s briefly go through the most outstanding advantages of the framework:

  • the app UI and logic don’t change depending on the platform
  • faster code development
  • increased time-to-market speed
  • close to native app performance
  • enormous UI customization potential
  • separate rendering engine
  • no reliance on platform-specific UI components
  • suitable for any target platform
  • minimizes the risks and losses for your business

Basically, Flutter is the quickest way to deliver a well-performing cross-platform mobile application. I can obviously tell that it’s just the matter of time when Flutter will officially become the ultimate cross-platform UI framework.

Testing Out All Flutter Features

forensic cloning service

Forensic Cloning Service

Forensic Cloning Service

Cloning

forensic clone is an exact, bit-for-bit copy of a hard drive. It’s also known as a bitstream image. In other words, every bit (1 or 0) is duplicated on a separate, forensically clean piece of media, such as a hard drive. Why go to all that trouble? Why not just copy and paste the files? The reasons are significant. First, copying and pasting only gets the active data—that is, data that are accessible to the user. These are the files and folders that users interact with, such as a Microsoft Word document. Second, it does not get the data in the unallocated space, including deleted and partially overwritten files. Third, it doesn’t capture the file system data. All of this would result in an ineffective and incomplete forensic exam.

We will want to make a forensic clone of the suspect’s hard drive(s) as soon as we reasonably can. Cloning a drive can be a pretty time-consuming process and, for that reason, it usually makes more sense to do the cloning in the lab as opposed to at the scene. Cloning in the lab eliminates the need to be on scene for what could be hours. It also provides a much more stable environment, affording us better control of the process.

Before we take a computer off-premises, we must have the legal authority to do so. In a criminal case, this request and the rationale behind it should be part of the search warrant application. In civil cases, this provision can be negotiated by the parties or ordered by a judge.

Although taking the hardware back to the lab is routine in criminal cases, the cloning may have to be done at the scene in a civil case. Most civil cases with digital evidence focus on business computers. A business computer sitting in a lab isn’t generating any revenue, which tends to get business folks understandably cranky. If the hard drive in a business computer can’t be replaced, then the machine is often cloned and put right back into service.

Purpose of cloning

We know from earlier chapters that digital evidence is extremely volatile. Thus, you never want to conduct your examination on the original evidence unless there are exigent circumstances or there is no other option available. Exigent circumstances could include situations in which a child is missing. Sometimes there are no tools or techniques available to solve the problem at hand.

Examining the clone affords us the chance at a “mulligan”—a do-over, as is said in golf—should something go wrong. If possible, the original drive should be preserved in a safe place and only brought out to reimage if needed.

Hard drives are susceptible to failure. Having two clones gives you one to examine and one to fall back on. Ideally, all examination is done on a clone as opposed to the original.

Sometimes that isn’t an option, especially in a business setting when the machine and drive must be returned to service. In the eyes of the court, a properly authenticated forensic clone is as good as the original.

The cloning process

Cloning a hard drive should be a pretty straightforward process, at least in theory. Typically, you will clone one hard drive to another. The suspect’s drive is known as the source drive and the drive you are cloning to is called the destination drive. The destination drive must be at least as large as (if not slightly larger than) our source drive. Although it is not always possible, knowing the size of the source in advance is pretty handy. Bringing the right size drive will save a lot of time and aggravation.

The drive we want to clone (the source) is normally removed from the computer. It’s then connected via cable to a cloning device of some kind or to another computer. It’s critical to have some type of write blocking in place before starting the process. A write block is a crucial piece of hardware or software that is used to safeguard the original evidence during the cloning process. The hardware write block is placed between the cloning device (PC, laptop, or standalone hardware) and the source. The write block prevents any data from being written to the original evidence drive. Using this kind of device eliminates the possibility of inadvertently compromising the evidence. Remember, the hardware write-blocking device goes in between the source drive and the cloning platform.

It takes little prep work to make a clone. The destination drive must be forensically cleaned before cloning a suspect’s drive to it. Most, if not all, forensic imaging tools will generate some type of paper trail, proving that this cleaning has taken place. This paperwork becomes part of the case file.

Once the connections are made, the process starts with the press of a couple of buttons or clicks of a mouse. When complete, a short report should be generated by the tool, indicating whether the cloning was successful. Cloning is successful when the hash values (think “digital fingerprint”) for the source and clone match. We’ll dig deeper into hash values in just a bit.

Forensically clean media

A forensically clean drive is one that can be proven to be devoid of any data at the time the clone is made. Being sterile is another way of looking at it. It is important to prove the drive is clean because comingled data is inadmissible data. Drives can be cleaned with the same devices used to make the clones. The cleaning process overwrites the entire hard drive with a particular pattern of data such as 1111111111111 (Casey, 2011).

Forensic image formats

The end result of the cloning process is a forensic image of the source hard drive. Our finished clone can come in a few different formats. The file extension is the most visible indicator of the file format. Some of the most common forensic image formats include:

EnCase (extension .E01)

Raw dd (extension .001)

AccessData Custom Content Image (extension .AD1)

There are differences in the formats, but they are all forensically sound. Some, like DD, are open source, while others, like AD1, are proprietary. Choosing one format over the other can simply be a matter of preference. Most forensic examination tools will read and write to multiple image formats.

In addition to being forensically sound, the other major consideration is that the tools to be used can read the image. The documentation with the tool should provide this information. Compatibility is a concern. This is especially true when exchanging image files between examiners.

Risks and challenges

The biggest risk during the cloning process is in writing to the source or evidence drive. Any writes to the evidence will compromise its integrity and jeopardize its admissibility. Getting a functioning write-blocking device or software in place will keep this from happening. Proper cloning should be pretty boring. Any time it gets exciting, you’ve got problems. What can ratchet up the adrenaline? Bad sectors and damaged or malfunctioning drives come to mind. A corrupt boot sector or a failing motor can also create complications.

Value in eDiscovery

The Sedona Conference, the leading think tank on electronic discovery, defines eDiscovery as “[t]he process of identifying, preserving, collecting, preparing, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information ‘ESI’) in the context of the legal process” (Sedona Conference, 2010).

Forensic cloning provides some additional value in the eDiscovery process. Preservation of potentially relevant data is paramount in electronic discovery. Parties that fail to preserve evidence can face some very stiff punishment. Forensic cloning is one option available to preserve some kinds of media, such as hard drives, and removable media, such as flash drives. It serves as the gold standard of data preservation in that it preserves all of the data on a piece of media, not just the active data. The down side of cloning is that it can be expensive and simply not practical in all situations.

Digital Forensics

Purpose of Cloning

forensic clone is an exact bit-for-bit copy of a piece of digital evidence. Files, folders, hard drives, and more can be cloned. A forensic clone is also known as a bit-stream image or forensic image. A forensic image of a hard drive captures everything on the hard drive, from the physical beginning to the physical end. Performing a “copy and paste” via the operating system is not the same as a forensic clone. A true forensic image captures both the active and latent data. That is a key difference between the two and the primary reason why a forensic image is preferred.

We know from earlier in the chapter that digital evidence is extremely volatile. As such, one should never conduct an examination on the original evidence unless there are exigent circumstances or no other options.

If possible, the original drive should be preserved in a safe place and only brought out to clone again if needed. Sometimes that is not an option, especially in a business setting wherein the machine and drive must be returned to service.

Hard drives are susceptible to failure. Having two clones gives an investigator one to examine and one to fall back on. Ideally, all examinations are done on a clone as opposed to the original.

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SOFTWARE | SERVICE

What is forensic cloning? When we need it?

forensic cloning service

What is forensic cloning?

A forensic clone is an exact bit-for-bit copy of a piece of digital evidence. Files, folders, hard drives, and more can be cloned. A forensic clone is also known as a bit-stream image or forensic image.

Why cloning is an important step in digital forensic investigations?

A forensic image of a hard drive captures everything on the hard drive, from the physical beginning to the physical end. Performing a “copy and paste” via the operating system is not the same as a forensic clone. A true forensic image captures both the active and latent data.

Forensic image formats

The end result of the cloning process is a forensic image of the source hard drive. Our finished clone can come in a few different formats. The file extension is the most visible indicator of the file format. Some of the most common forensic image formats include:

• EnCase (extension .E01)
• Raw dd (extension .001)
• AccessData Custom Content Image (extension .AD1)

There are differences in the formats, but they are all forensically sound. Some, like DD, are open source, while others, like AD1, are proprietary. Choosing one format over the other can simply be a matter of preference. Most forensic examination tools will read and write to multiple image formats.

Azure Cognitive Computer Vision

Azure Cognitive Computer Vision

Azure Cognitive Computer Vision

What is Image Analysis?

 Important

Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 is now enforced for all HTTP requests to this service. For more information, see Azure Cognitive Services security.

The Computer Vision Image Analysis service can extract a wide variety of visual features from your images. For example, it can determine whether an image contains adult content, find specific brands or objects, or find human faces.

You can use Image Analysis through a client library SDK or by calling the REST API directly. Follow the quickstart to get started.

This documentation contains the following types of articles:

  • The quickstarts are step-by-step instructions that let you make calls to the service and get results in a short period of time.
  • The how-to guides contain instructions for using the service in more specific or customized ways.
  • The conceptual articles provide in-depth explanations of the service’s functionality and features.
  • The tutorials are longer guides that show you how to use this service as a component in broader business solutions.

Image Analysis features

You can analyze images to provide insights about their visual features and characteristics. All of the features in the list below are provided by the Analyze Image API. Follow a quickstart to get started.

Tag visual features

Identify and tag visual features in an image, from a set of thousands of recognizable objects, living things, scenery, and actions. When the tags are ambiguous or not common knowledge, the API response provides hints to clarify the context of the tag. Tagging isn’t limited to the main subject, such as a person in the foreground, but also includes the setting (indoor or outdoor), furniture, tools, plants, animals, accessories, gadgets, and so on. Tag visual features

Detect objects

Object detection is similar to tagging, but the API returns the bounding box coordinates for each tag applied. For example, if an image contains a dog, cat and person, the Detect operation will list those objects together with their coordinates in the image. You can use this functionality to process further relationships between the objects in an image. It also lets you know when there are multiple instances of the same tag in an image. Detect objects

Detect brands

Identify commercial brands in images or videos from a database of thousands of global logos. You can use this feature, for example, to discover which brands are most popular on social media or most prevalent in media product placement. Detect brands

Categorize an image

Identify and categorize an entire image, using a category taxonomy with parent/child hereditary hierarchies. Categories can be used alone, or with our new tagging models.
Currently, English is the only supported language for tagging and categorizing images. Categorize an image

Describe an image

Generate a description of an entire image in human-readable language, using complete sentences. Computer Vision’s algorithms generate various descriptions based on the objects identified in the image. The descriptions are each evaluated and a confidence score generated. A list is then returned ordered from highest confidence score to lowest. Describe an image

Detect faces

Detect faces in an image and provide information about each detected face. Computer Vision returns the coordinates, rectangle, gender, and age for each detected face.
Computer Vision provides a subset of the Face service functionality. You can use the Face service for more detailed analysis, such as facial identification and pose detection. Detect faces

Detect image types

Detect characteristics about an image, such as whether an image is a line drawing or the likelihood of whether an image is clip art. Detect image types

Detect domain-specific content

Use domain models to detect and identify domain-specific content in an image, such as celebrities and landmarks. For example, if an image contains people, Computer Vision can use a domain model for celebrities to determine if the people detected in the image are known celebrities. Detect domain-specific content

Detect the color scheme

Analyze color usage within an image. Computer Vision can determine whether an image is black & white or color and, for color images, identify the dominant and accent colors. Detect the color scheme

Generate a thumbnail

Analyze the contents of an image to generate an appropriate thumbnail for that image. Computer Vision first generates a high-quality thumbnail and then analyzes the objects within the image to determine the area of interest. Computer Vision then crops the image to fit the requirements of the area of interest. The generated thumbnail can be presented using an aspect ratio that is different from the aspect ratio of the original image, depending on your needs. Generate a thumbnail

Get the area of interest

Analyze the contents of an image to return the coordinates of the area of interest. Instead of cropping the image and generating a thumbnail, Computer Vision returns the bounding box coordinates of the region, so the calling application can modify the original image as desired. Get the area of interest

Moderate content in images

You can use Computer Vision to detect adult content in an image and return confidence scores for different classifications. The threshold for flagging content can be set on a sliding scale to accommodate your preferences.

Image requirements

Image Analysis works on images that meet the following requirements:

  • The image must be presented in JPEG, PNG, GIF, or BMP format
  • The file size of the image must be less than 4 megabytes (MB)
  • The dimensions of the image must be greater than 50 x 50 pixels

Data privacy and security

As with all of the Cognitive Services, developers using the Computer Vision service should be aware of Microsoft’s policies on customer data. See the Cognitive Services page on the Microsoft Trust Center to learn more.

Azure’s Computer Vision service gives you access to advanced algorithms that process images and return information based on the visual project.

Create a custom computer vision model in minutes

Customize and embed state-of-the-art computer vision image analysis for specific domains with Custom Vision, part of Azure Cognitive Services. Build frictionless customer experiences, optimize manufacturing processes, accelerate digital marketing campaigns, and more. No machine learning expertise is required.

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AI

What is Azure Cognitive Services – Computer Vision?

Azure Cognitive Computer Vision
Azure Cognitive Computer Vision

What is Azure Cognitive Services – Computer Vision?

What is Azure Cognitive Services – Computer Vision?
Azure Cognitive Services makes AI project development to be simpler, and faster!

 What Cognitive Services can do?
1. OCR
– Read text from image, pdf

2. Face Detection
– Detect how many human face in a photo
– gender and age analysis

3. Image descriptions
– If you upload a swimming photo, AI will tell you there is a male or female swimming

4. Spatial Analysis(link to CCTV or surveillance cameras)
– Detect how long the person appears in the cctv
– Detect the person wears mask or not
– Measure the distance between people

What is Computer Vision?

Computer Vision for digital asset management

Computer Vision can power many digital asset management (DAM) scenarios. DAM is the business process of organizing, storing, and retrieving rich media assets and managing digital rights and permissions. For example, a company may want to group and identify images based on visible logos, faces, objects, colors, and so on. Or, you might want to automatically generate captions for images and attach keywords so they’re searchable. For an all-in-one DAM solution using Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and intelligent reporting, see the Knowledge Mining Solution Accelerator Guide on GitHub. For other DAM examples, see the Computer Vision Solution Templates repository.

Image requirements

Computer Vision can analyze images that meet the following requirements:

  • • The image must be presented in JPEG, PNG, GIF, or BMP format
  • • The file size of the image must be less than 4 megabytes (MB)
  • • The dimensions of the image must be greater than 50 x 50 pixels
    •     • For the Read API, the dimensions of the image must be between 50 x 50 and 10000 x 10000 pixels.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Computer Vision’s OCR APIs support several languages. They do not require you to specify a language code. See the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) overview for more information.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Language Language code Read 3.2 OCR API Read 3.0/3.1
Afrikaans af
Albanian sq
Arabic ar
Asturian ast
Basque eu
Bislama bi
Breton br
Catalan ca
Cebuano ceb
Chamorro ch
Chinese Simplified zh-Hans
Chinese Traditional zh-Hant
Cornish kw
Corsican co
Crimean Tatar Latin crh
Czech cs
Danish da
Dutch nl
English (incl. handwritten) en ✔ (print only)
Estonian et
Fijian fj
Filipino fil
Finnish fi
French fr
Friulian fur
Galician gl
German de
Gilbertese gil
Greek el
Greenlandic kl
Haitian Creole ht
Hani hni
Hmong Daw Latin mww
Hungarian hu
Indonesian id
Interlingua ia
Inuktitut Latin iu
Irish ga
Italian it
Japanese ja
Javanese jv
K'iche' quc
Kabuverdianu kea
Kachin Latin kac
Kara-Kalpak kaa
Kashubian csb
Khasi kha
Korean ko
Kurdish Latin kur
Luxembourgish lb
Malay Latin ms
Manx gv
Neapolitan nap
Norwegian nb
Norwegian no
Occitan oc
Polish pl
Portuguese pt
Romanian ro
Romansh rm
Russian ru
Scots sco
Scottish Gaelic gd
Serbian Cyrillic sr-Cyrl
Serbian Latin sr-Latn
Slovak sk
Slovenian slv
Spanish es
Swahili Latin sw
Swedish sv
Tatar Latin tat
Tetum tet
Turkish tr
Upper Sorbian hsb
Uzbek Latin uz
Volapük vo
Walser wae
Western Frisian fy
Yucatec Maya yua
Zhuang za
Zulu zu

Native vs Cross Platform

Native vs Cross Platform

Native vs Cross Platform

Native vs Cross Platform

Native vs Cross Platform

In computing, cross-platform software (also multi-platform software or platform-independent software) is computer software that is implemented on multiple computing platforms.[1] Cross-platform software may be divided into two types; one requires individual building or compilation for each platform that it supports, and the other one can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, e.g., software written in an interpreted language or pre-compiled portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all platforms.[2]

For example, a cross-platform application may run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. Cross-platform programs may run on as many as all existing platforms, or on as few as two platforms. Cross-platform frameworks (such as Codename One, Kivy, Qt, Flutter, NativeScript, Xamarin, Phonegap, Ionic, and React Native) exist to aid cross-platform development.[3]

Platforms[edit]

Platform can refer to the type of processor (CPU) or other hardware on which a given operating system or application runs, the type of operating system on a computer or the combination of the type of hardware and the type of operating system running on it.[4] An example of a common platform is Microsoft Windows running on the x86 architecture. Other well-known desktop computer platforms include Linux/Unix and macOS – both of which are themselves cross-platform.[4] There are, however, many devices such as smartphones that are also effectively computer platforms but less commonly thought about in that way. Application software can be written to depend on the features of a particular platform—either the hardware, operating system, or virtual machine it runs on. The Java platform is a virtual machine platform which runs on many operating systems and hardware types, and is a common platform for software to be written for.

Hardware platforms[edit]

A hardware platform can refer to an instruction set architecture. For example: x86 architecture and its variants such as IA-32 and x86-64. These machines often run one version of Microsoft Windows,[5] though they can run other operating systems as well, including Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, macOS and FreeBSD.

The 32-bit ARM architectures (and newer 64-bit version) is common on smartphones and tablet computers, which run Android, iOS and other mobile operating systems.

Software platforms[edit]

Software platforms can either be an operating system or programming environment, though more commonly it is a combination of both. A notable exception to this is Java, which uses an operating system independent virtual machine for its compiled code, known in the world of Java as bytecode. Examples of software platforms are:

Minor/historical

Java platform[edit]

As previously noted, the Java platform is an exception to the general rule that an operating system is a software platform. The Java language typically compiles to a virtual machine: a virtual CPU which runs all of the code that is written for the language. This enables the same executable binary to run on all systems that implement a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Java programs can be executed natively using a Java processor. This isn’t common and is mostly used for embedded systems.

Java code running in the JVM has access to OS-related services, like disk I/O and network access, if the appropriate privileges are granted. The JVM makes the system calls on behalf of the Java application. This setup allows users to decide the appropriate protection level, depending on an ACL. For example, disk and network access is usually enabled for desktop applications, but not for browser-based applets. JNI can also be used to enable access to operating system specific functions.

Currently, Java Standard Edition programs can run on Microsoft Windows, macOS, several Unix-like operating systems, and several more non-UNIX-like operating systems like embedded systems. For mobile applications, browser plugins are used for Windows and Mac based devices, and Android has built-in support for Java. There are also subsets of Java, such as Java Card or Java Platform, Micro Edition, designed for resource-constrained devices.

Implementations[edit]

For a piece of software to be considered cross-platform, it must be able to function on more than one computer architecture or operating system. Developing such a program can be a time-consuming task because different operating systems have different application programming interfaces (API). For example, Linux uses a different API for application software than Windows does.

Software written for a particular operating system does not automatically work on all architectures that operating system supports. One example as of August 2006 was OpenOffice.org, which did not natively run on the AMD64 or Intel 64 lines of processors implementing the x86-64 standards for computers; this has since been changed, and the OpenOffice.org suite of software is “mostly” ported to these 64-bit systems.[8] This also means that just because a program is written in a popular programming language such as C or C++, it does not mean it will run on all operating systems that support that programming language—or even on the same operating system on a different architecture.

Web applications[edit]

Web applications are typically described as cross-platform because, ideally, they are accessible from any of various web browsers within different operating systems. Such applications generally employ a client–server system architecture, and vary widely in complexity and functionality. This wide variability significantly complicates the goal of cross-platform capability, which is routinely at odds with the goal of advanced functionality.

Basic web applications perform all or most processing from a stateless server, and pass the result to the client web browser. All user interaction with the application consists of simple exchanges of data requests and server responses. These types of applications were the norm in the early phases of World Wide Web application development. Such applications follow a simple transaction model, identical to that of serving static web pages. Today, they are still relatively common, especially where cross-platform compatibility and simplicity are deemed more critical than advanced functionalities.

Prominent examples of advanced web applications include the Web interface to Gmail, A9.com, Google Maps website, and the Live Search service (now Bing) from Microsoft. Such advanced applications routinely depend on additional features found only in the more recent versions of popular web browsers. These dependencies include Ajax, JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, SVG, and other components of rich web applications. Older versions of popular web browsers tend to lack support for certain features.

 

Pros & Cons of Native Applications
When it comes to native versus cross-platform and making a choice, it is paramount to learn about the pros and cons of each of these frameworks. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of native applications first.

Pros of Native App Development
High Performance
Native built apps offer extremely high performance in terms of speed, responsiveness and operational efficiency. This is possible as these platform specific apps are programmed using core programming languages and APIs. Moreover, they are able to leverage the device’s processing speed to its full potential, hence ensuring lower load time.

Broad Functionality
As highlighted earlier, the biggest advantage of native over cross platform is the former’s ability to access all the features of the platform it is made for. This ultimately results in faster execution & better user experience. Additionally, native apps can function without internet connectivity making it the best solution for complex mobile applications.

Ultimate UI/UX
To create apps with robust and intuitive user experience and consistent look and feel, native technology is your best bet. Developed using native software development kits (SDKs) and destined for a particular operating system, native mobile apps deliver a more natural flow to its users.

Moreover, sticking to specific guidelines allows familiar actions & gestures for users and maintaining aspect ratio ensures better visuals and better control over the user interface.

Higher Security and Reliability
Native apps are better poised to provide protection against security violations over cross-platform apps. How? Native apps are programmed using the core language of the platform, which makes them more secure and reliable.

Also, features such as proactive security upgrades, multi-factor authentication and remote management controls ensure the strictest data security and privacy.

Store’s Support
It is easier to launch native apps in the app store as they comply with iOS and Android guidelines by default. Native is considered to be preferred both by Google & Apple as they mostly feature native apps on their store. And ofcourse, getting featured on an app store reinforces your brand and gives your downloads a quantum jump.

Cons of Native App Development
High Cost
The biggest drawback of Native development is its cost. There are two primary reasons for this high cost – first, native app development is complex due to which professional development and support consumes a lion’s share of the project budget. Note that, native mobile developers are more expensive compared to cross-platform ones. Second, in order to cater to two different sets of audiences i.e., Android and iOS, it requires two distinct native apps, leading to setting up two development teams, and ultimately soaring the total cost.

Difficulties with Updates and Maintenance
Maintaining separate builds for separate platforms that require regular maintenance & support is challenging. You may face difficulty in collaborating several teams or in rolling out feature updates or new features.

Slow Development Speed
The speed of development is yet another downside of mobile native vs. cross-platform app. It consumes significantly more time to develop a native app than its cross-platform counterpart does. There’s also no chance to repurpose the native code of one operating system for another, resulting in slower development.

What is Cross-platform app development?
Cross-platform app development provides you the flexibility of building mobile applications using a universal language, making this single app compatible with more than one mobile platforms. The key advantage of cross-platform is code reusability, thereby simplifying the entire development process.

aiFlows Technologies Sdn Bhd

Software

Native Apps vs Hybrid Apps

native vs cross platform

Types of Mobile Apps

Before we continue, I just want to quickly cover the different types of app development from a coding perspective.

Generally speaking, mobile app developers can build an app in one of these three categories:

  • • Native apps — Coded in a language that’s supported natively by a specific device’s operating system. (Example: native iOS app vs. native Android app).
  • • Hybrid apps — Cross-platform development. Apps are coded in one language that can run on multiple platforms.
  • • Progressive web applicaitons (PWA) — A lightweight app that runs in the URL of a device’s web browser. It looks and feels like a mobile app, but it’s not delivered natively on the device.

Cost Comparison

native vs cross platform

The Basic Difference between Native and Cross-Platform App

Native apps are developed exclusively for a specific platform. These apps are developed in a language compatible with the platform. Apple, for instance, prefers Objective C and Swift for iOS while Google favors Java for Android. Using these acceptable languages, developers can make better use of the innate features of these platforms. A native app developed for Android will not function on iOS and vice versa.

Cross-platform apps are compatible with multiple platforms. Due to the market share of Android and iOS, most cross-platform apps are limited to these two operating systems. These apps are developed in HTML and CSS since these standard web technologies are platform independent. There are several cross-platform application development tools that allow developers to create these apps with little trouble.

Now that you know the difference between cross-platform and native apps, let’s see how they compare.

native vs cross platform

What Is Web Application

What Is Web Application

What Is Web Application

How are mobile apps built?

Mobile apps are more expensive to develop than web apps, and because they are platform-specific, launching an app across different platforms pretty much means starting from scratch in terms of design and development. However, they are much faster, and tend to be more advanced in terms of features and functionality.

Native mobile apps are built using specific languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) depending on the intended platform. Apple devices run on the iOS native operating system, so Apple apps are built using either Objective-C or Swift, and the Xcode IDE. Native apps for Android are written in Java and are commonly built using the Android Studio or Eclipse IDE.

Apple and Google also provide their own development tools, interface elements and software development kits (SDK) which developers can use to build native mobile apps.

How are web apps built?

Web apps tend to be built using JavaScript, CSS and HTML5. Unlike mobile apps, there is no standard software development kit for building web apps. However, developers do have access to templates. Compared to mobile apps, web apps are usually quicker and easier to build — but they are much simpler in terms of features.

Progressive web apps: the best of both?

In light of recent web development trends, it’s also worth being aware of progressive web apps. While standard web apps lack some of the functionality that mobile apps can offer, progressive web apps fall somewhere in between.

Unlike standard web apps (and more like native mobile apps), progressive web apps are able to work offline, and load extremely quickly. This is primarily down to advancements in the sophistication of the modern browser: thanks to the Application Cache feature, websites can now store large volumes of data offline. Progressive web apps can therefore be used without an internet connection, giving them some typical native mobile app functionalities such as push notifications, native video and audio capture, and native video playback.

Just like standard web apps, progressive web apps don’t require download or installation. In many ways, they seem to offer the best of both worlds. As Alex Russell, who invented the term, describes them: PWAs are “responsive, connectivity-independent, app-like, fresh, safe, discoverable, re-engageable, installable, linkable web experiences.”

Best Malaysia Software website company

Best Malaysia Software website company

Best Malaysia Software website company

Low Cost of Entry

Because of the way PWAs make it so easy to bring an app to consumers (see: everything that came before this), there are some very real savings in terms of the time involved to develop, launch, and market the app.

This low cost of entry makes a PWA very attractive to retail and hospitality businesses looking for a return on their investment.

Native apps have changed the way consumers interact with businesses—the app is a marketing tool and storefront all in one—and PWAs are perfectly suited for this use. The ease with which a business can get a customer using their app is crucial in this regard.

And Speaking of Consumer/Retail Apps

Though they don’t have quite the capabilities that a native app does, PWAs vastly improve the e-commerce experience on the mobile web.

They vastly improve it compared to shopping on your computer at home, too. Go to your phone and shop for a pizza on the Domino’s pizza website, then shop for the same thing using their app. One of those experiences was much better.

If they’d been running a PWA, it could and would look and act just like the native app. There’d be no scrolling jitters, the text would be easier to read—just a clean, responsive, interactive experience.

Also, while PWAs lag behind native apps in terms of features, they can do what is arguably the most important one for a consumer app: push notifications.

When users opt-in to pushes, retailers get to market directly to them using what is arguably the most effective form of mobile communication.

These can happen whether or not the browser is running, so you’ve got 24/7 messaging access to users. Don’t wake them up in the middle of the night, though, even though you totally could.

So, yes: Progressive Web Apps are a future of mobile. Not the future of mobile, but definitely one of them. That’s because native apps aren’t going away anytime soon.

The Benefits of Native Apps

PWAs solved the problem of easy onboarding and compatibility, but then create a new one: not being able to fully interact with the device on which they’re run.

Remember, it’s the browser that delivers the Progressive Web App experience, but it’s the device and OS that make the browser possible.

That extra layer of software-running-software acts as a kind of wall between the PWA and the device and that wall gives the advantage to native apps in several areas.

They’re just faster.

It’s true. The code lives on the device where it’s being processed, and it’s been written specifically for that device.

Think of it as a language translation. You and I both speak English and talk directly to one another. If you only spoke French, though, we’d need a translator between us to facilitate the conversation, but also slowing it down. The browser is the translator for a web app and adds latency to the experience.

They can GEO-fence.

If you’ve never heard of it, GEO-fencing enables app makers to define virtual perimeters in the actual world.

When their users step inside those boundaries, it triggers an action on the device. When combined with push notifications, GEOfencing is incredibly powerful for marketing and retail applications.

Imagine being able to automatically send messages to your customers: Hey, you’re really close to our shop! Come on in the next hour and get a 10% discount. A PWA can use location services to know where the device is, but at this time the only way to make that work with a GEOfence is with a native app.

Geofencing Diagram

Source

NFC Support

Near Field Communication is the protocol your phone uses when you use it to pay for things. PWAs don’t have a way to interact with the NFC chip that makes these payments possible.

If you’re a brick and mortar store that accepts digital payments, you’re going to need to go native if you want your app to be able to play along.

Mobile payments greatly enhance the customer experience and also tie in nicely with your app in a variety of ways (like if you have a loyalty component built-in to it).

Native Apps Interact With Other Apps

You know when you go to create a user account with an app, and you’re given the option of logging in with Facebook?

It saves you a lot of time: you choose the option, the Facebook app pops up and passes the credentials along and you’re done, right back to what you were doing and logged in.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen with PWAs—there’s no mechanism for them to talk to other apps, native or otherwise. Apart from being a timesaver for the user, this ability also centralizes their logins to a single sign-on (more or less).

Ensuring that users don’t have yet another account to remember is actually a pretty nice thing you can do for them.

Native Apps are “Smarter”

Features like a proximity sensor and ambient light detection aren’t necessarily need-to-haves, but they are the kind of things that make your smartphone smart.

If it’s dark in the room, your phone won’t blind you with its brightest screen setting. Put the phone face down on a table, and the screen automatically shuts off to conserve battery.

Also, your spouse will think you’re hiding something, so always keep your phone face up.

Wake Lock

A wake lock is when an app overrides the system setting for turning the screen off after a certain amount of time of inactivity.

If you read books on your device or stream movies, you’ll notice that you can go for long periods of time without interacting with the device and the screen never goes black.

PWAs can’t do this and depending on a user’s settings their device could go dark while they’re in the middle of reading or looking at something.

App Stores Aren’t All Bad

Remember up above, when I was going on about the bureaucracy of the app stores, and how it slows things down? Well, sure it’s a pain, but it also serves a purpose.

That review process is essentially a third-party quality control review—users can download with confidence knowing that the app isn’t going to contain any malicious code, spyware, malware, etc. That’s not at all guaranteed with PWAs.

They do operate over secure connections but remember that running a web app is as simple as visiting the web page where it lives.

You arrive at the page, and you’re running the app. It wouldn’t take a lot for someone with bad intentions to exploit that connection.

And So What Have We Learned?

There’s a lot to like about both native and Progressive Web Apps, and there’s still enough difference between them at this point that deciding between them can be a clear-cut exercise.

The choice is dependent on your needs (which, really, is what all choices should be dependent on).

Do you want a basic consumer/retail app that makes it easy for your customers to interact with and shop with you when they’re not in your store? PWAs are a good fit.

Especially for a small business, which might not have the time or resources to put into creating a mobile masterpiece, PWAs are a great solution.

They can give businesses a compelling mobile presence—and the tools to reach customers—that might not have been able to build one otherwise. PWAs are an equalizer of sorts in this regard, putting small—and likely cash-strapped—businesses onto a more competitive playing field.

Do you want something that takes full advantage of the smartphone and its capabilities? Native apps are the way to go. For a business that can afford one, even through a DIY app builder, the ability to GEOfence and reach customers when they’re nearby could be worth the price difference all on its own.

Integrating payments is also another feature that ups the mobility factor of an app. There’s no question that a native app delivers a more robust, better performing user experience once it’s installed.

Of course, all this could change in the next few years, since technological advancement is as stagnant as a three-year-old on a sugar high.

PWAs continue to gain features as developers try and push the limits of what can be done inside the browser. But there’s no definitive timeline on this, and native apps will also keep growing as the devices they sit on get more advanced.

Whichever way you go, though, the ultimate goal is to deliver an application that users can easily work with and benefit from. And there’s no question you can do that either way. The choice is yours.

aiFlows Technologies Sdn Bhd

Software

What Is a Web Application? How It Works?

What Is The Difference Between A Mobile App And A Web App?

There is a common misconception that native mobile apps and web apps are the same thing — but actually, the two are very different.

Not only are there differences for the user; they are also developed and deployed differently, so it’s important not to get the two confused.

First though, it can be useful to distinguish between web apps and websites. Simply put, a web app is a website that is designed fluidly, responding to being viewed on a smartphone. There are many different types of websites out there, some are static and rarely updated, while others are responsive and have a great deal of interactivity.  Web apps, specifically, function like downloadable apps, but all from the comfort of your phone’s browser.

But what is the difference between a mobile app and a web app? Let’s take a look.

Mobile apps vs web apps

Mobile apps vs Web apps

Native mobile apps are built for a specific platform, such as iOS for the Apple iPhone or Android for a Samsung device. They are downloaded and installed via an app store and have access to system resources, such as GPS and the camera function. Mobile apps live and run on the device itself. Snapchat, Instagram, Google Maps and Facebook Messenger are some examples of popular mobile apps.

Web apps, on the other hand, are accessed via the internet browser and will adapt to whichever device you’re viewing them on. They are not native to a particular system, and don’t need to be downloaded or installed. Due to their responsive nature, they do indeed look and function a lot like mobile apps — and this is where the confusion arises.

Let’s consider the Yelp native app vs. the Yelp.com web app. If you install the Yelp app on your mobile and then access Yelp.com via the browser on your phone, you’ll notice that the web app has been made to look and feel like the native mobile app: it turns your browser bar red, and when you scroll down, locks the search bar in place.

Mobile apps vs. web apps: The pros and cons

Now we know the fundamental differences between mobile and web apps, we can recap the pros and cons of each:

Native mobile apps

Pros:

  • – Faster than web apps
  • – Greater functionality as they have access to system resources
  • – Can work offline
  • – Safe and secure — native apps must first be approved by the app store
  • – Easier to build due to the availability of developer tools, interface elements and SDKs

Cons:

  • – More expensive to build than web apps
  • – Compatibility with different platforms (i.e. iOS and Android) usually means designing and building the app from scratch
  • – Expensive to maintain and update
  • – It may prove difficult to get a native app approved by the app store

Web apps

Pros:

  • – Do not need to be downloaded or installed — web apps function in-browser
  • – Easy to maintain — they have a common codebase regardless of mobile platform
  • – Will update themselves
  • – Quicker and easier to build than mobile apps
  • – Do not require app store approval, so can be launched quickly

Cons:

  • – Do not work offline
  • – Slower than mobile apps, and less advanced in terms of features
  • – May not be as discoverable as mobile apps as they are not listed in a specific database, such as the app store
  • – Quality and security is not always guaranteed — web apps don’t need to be approved by the app store