When you’re selecting a Content Management System for your company blog, there are not many choices left – no doubt, you’ll end up with WordPress or Tumblr. If you’re looking for an ecommerce solution, the landscape is a bit more complex – Magento, osCommerce, Shopify, to name just a few – but when comparing key features and pricing models, you’ll easily make a decision that fits your specific needs. However, when you enter the mobile space, in most cases you won’t find quick answers or cookie-cutter solutions as to which technologies to choose and why they will make your app a success.
While talking to our customers about their mobile applications, the conversation often ends up with a discussion about very specific technologies and tools they have never heard about. The mobile ecosystem is a moving target that is tweaking existing technologies and constantly adding new ones. And that’s why our R&D department continuously monitors the space to find more efficient and faster ways to develop your app.
In one of our recent articles we categorized our growing number of mobile projects by operating systems – Android and iOS. Now we’d like to showcase our mobile portfolio using the most popular industries (Entertainment, mCommerce, Communication, General-Purpose Apps) and some cool technologies. We also hope this post will answer some questions we’re receiving from our customers.
1. Technologies for Entertainment Apps
1.1 Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is a view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by a computer-generated sensory input – graphics, video sound, or GPS data.”
- OpenCV – aka Open Source Computer Vision Library, a neat library of programming functions mainly designed for real-time computer vision and image processing. Projects from our portfolio: Satan Begone and MedEye.
- ARToolKit – a software library specially for building Augmented Reality apps. ARToolKit allowed us to solve one known problem of AR development related to tracking the users’ viewpoint.
- OpenGL – Open Graphics Library was developed in 1992 and it’s now is a standard specification defining a cross-language, multi-platform API for creating applications and simulating physics that create 2D and 3D computer graphics.
1.2 Mobile and Social Games
- Unity 3D is a neat tool for video game development, architectural visualizations, and interactive media installations. Unity’s development environment runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and the games it produces can be run on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, iOS and Android.
1.3 Graphics
- Scalable Vector Graphics – is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics that has support for interactivity and animation.
- Tesseract OCR – an awesome library that helped us with scanning images.
- Picture-in-picture technology. In television, PiP is often used to watch one program while waiting for another to start, or advertisements to finish.
- iOS Graphics Library – it uses mesh-warping algorithm (Bezier curve for warping the images and various effects) and bilinear interpolation (for filling in missing pixels).
1.4 Voice and Speech
- NeoSpeech, a text-to-speech (TTS) software that helped us generate extremely high-quality, natural sounding human voices from text input.
- Dragon SDK for voice recognition. The Dragon NaturallySpeaking software developer kit (SDK) is used by developers and integrators to add speech recognition capabilities into in-house and commercial applications or workflow applications.
2. Technologies for Mobile Commerce Apps
- In-App Purchase lets you sell a variety of items directly within your free or paid app, including premium content, virtual goods, and subscriptions. And just like apps you sell on the App Store, you receive 70% of the purchase price.
- Google Play In-app Billing – a Google Play service that lets you sell digital content from inside your applications.
- PayPal APl – Mobile PayPal Payments enables merchants and partners to offer a streamlined checkout experience to customers using mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android devices
- SOAP, an XML-based protocol that lets applications exchange information over HTTP.
- Social Commerce and Social Shopping. Featured projects from our portfolio: Pikaba and Pushcart.
3. Technologies for General-Purpose Apps
- Google Maps Android API – The new Google Maps Android API v2 allows you to offer interactive, feature-rich maps to users of your Android application
- Foursquare API gives you access to all of the data used by the foursquare mobile applications.
- Facebook API allows you to reach millions of people on mobile each month by integrating your app with our tools and SDKs.
- Social Sharing – Twitter, Facebook, Google+.
4. Technologies for Communication & Multimedia Apps
- Socket connection over local Wi-Fi for connection with Android devices: aka Socket Programming into the project that allowed the application to communicate with another phone running the same application over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, where one phone is the ‘server’ and the other is the ‘client’.
- OpenSIPS (Open SIP Server) was used as the main technology for the app. It’s an Open Source implementation of a SIP server. But OpenSIPS is more than a SIP proxy/router as it includes application-level functionalities. OpenSIPS, as a SIP server, is the core component of any SIP-based VoIP solution. With a very flexible and customizable routing engine, OpenSIPS ‘unifies voice, video, IM and presence services in a highly efficient way, thanks to its scalable (modular) design. Мobile Walkie-Talkie Or A Skype-Like Аpp Based On SIP Protocol: /blog/skype-like-mobile-app/
- OpenTok – allows you to weave live, group video chat in to your application.
- Amazon S3 for hosting streaming videos.
Take the Next Step
At DB Best we’ve helped many customers across the globe with their mobile apps. Want to learn more? Check out our Portfolio and see why we’re the best company for your next mobile app project.
