Browser based video formats in HTML5

Video formats are diverse and each of them can be used in a specified browsers. Few of the video formats are MP4, VP8, VP9, Theora and so on. There are lots of browsers being used in the web. Most of the web developers are not aware of the latest browsers and the video formats supported by the browsers, they automatically use the prescribed or default video formats. In order to display the videos without any plugins, HTML 5 launched an element called ‘video element’.

Let us have brief information about the Video element of HTML 5 and the browser-based video formats in this article…

HTML 5 Supported Video Formats

HTML5 does not state which video formats should be supported browsers. If a video format is appropriate, the browser can support them for free. But, content authors will not allow them to do so, as they consider that the browsers have no least set of video formats to support.

The HTML5 Working Group states that, each browser should support at least one video format. That ideal format of a video should hold the following constraints:

• Royalty-free
• Good image quality
• Low decode processor use
• Good compression
• Hardware video decoder must be present with software decoder for a video format. 

Video Element of HTML 5

To download a video file in a browser, two methods are used:

• JavaScript canPlayType() function

Type refers to the MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extension) type and the list of codecs. This instructs the browser to decode the file.

•  <source>

Fallback is supported by the ‘video’ element through the multiple sources specifications. <source> can be any number of elements. The file to be downloaded can be picked by the browser.

Browser- based Video Formats

Theora and WebM are the free formats. MPEG-4 is the non-free format. The most common browser-based video formats in HTML 5 are:

• Theora
• H.264 (MP4)
• VP8
• VP9
• MPEG 4

Let us see in detail about the browser-based video formats regarding their operating systems, versions, and the browsers to be used.

 

Theora

Theora	Browser	OS	Latest Version
3.0	Google Chrome	35.0.1916.153	35.0.1916.153
Manual	Internet Explorer	Windows	11.09
3.5	Mozilla Firefox	Windows 7+, Vista, Linux,  Android and others	30.0 ESR 24.6.0
2.3	Android	Android	4.2.1 Jelly Bean
2.28	Web	All supported	3.12.2
10.50	Opera	Windows Presto, Windows OS, Linux, FreeBSD	12.17, 22.0.1471.7, 12.16
r18297	Chromium	Unix, & others	-
Manual	Safari	OSX	7.0.5, 6.1.5
4.4	Konqueror	All supported	4.13.1

 

H.264 (MP4)

MP4	Browser	OS	Latest Version
3.0	Google Chrome	35.0.1916.153
9.0, 9.0, 10.0	Internet Explorer	Windows, Windows Phone, Windows RT	11.09, 10.0, 10.0
21.0, 22.0, 26.0, 17.0	Mozilla Firefox	Windows 7+, Vista, Linux,  Android	30.0 ESR 24.6.0
3.0	Android	Android	4.2.1 Jelly Bean
2.28	Web	All supported	3.12.2
11.50	Opera	20 for Android 12.0.22 for Symbian S60 10.0 for Windows Mobile
3.1	Safari	OSX	7.0.5, 6.1.5
Manual	Chromium	Unix	-
4.4	Konqueror	All supported	4.13.1

 

 VP8

VP8	Browser	OS	Latest Version
6.0	Google Chrome	35.0.1916.153
Manual	Internet Explorer	Windows	11.09
4.0	Mozilla Firefox	Windows 7+, Vista, Linux,  Android & others	30.0 ESR 24.6.0
2.3	Android	Android	4.2.1 Jelly Bean
2.28	Web	All supported	3.12.2
11.50 10.50	Opera	20 for Android, 12.0.22 for Symbian S60 10.0 for Windows Mobile
		Windows Presto, Windows OS, Linux, FreeBSD
Manual	Safari	OSX	7.0.5, 6.1.5
r47759	Chromium	Unix	-
4.4	Konqueror	All supported	4.13.1

 VP9

VP9	Browser	OS	Latest Version
29.0	Google Chrome	35.0.1916.153
-	Internet Explorer	-
28.0	Mozilla Firefox	Windows 7+, Vista, Linux,  Android & others	30.0 ESR 24.6.0
-	Android	-
2.28	Web	All supported	3.12.2
16.0	Opera	20 for Android 12.0.22 for Symbian S60 10.0 for Windows Mobile
-	Safari	-	-
r172738	Chromium	Unix	-
4.4	Konqueror	All supported	4.13.1

   

MPEG 4/H.264

This format is widely used. It has good speed, video quality, hardware decoders, and compression.

H.264 is used in MP4 format, with Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio. Users of MP4 should hold the licences of both AAC and H.264. This format is supported by Apple and Microsoft. 

Promote your business using open source website development

Technology growth is visible with the evolving new technology-based gadgets and web solutions in the market. This makes a clear statement that internet has become a new platform to boost up the business. This attracts millions of users towards this great technology, and the number of web users has escalated. As a result, the development of websites and web applications has also been increased.

Open Source platforms are the gifted boon to the burgeoning eCommerce industry. When compared to the usual commercial products, these platforms present noteworthy benefits. This is one of the amazing platforms to craft and develop strong and scalable web applications and websites.

Let us have a quick study of how open source website development endorse and amplify the E-business…

Open Source
The word ‘open source’ implies that it is open to all. This is also known as ‘Free Source Software’. This model gives you the universal access without any license. Using this amazing software, websites creations are done at ease. The persons with minimal technical knowledge can craft and design a site without any technical help.

Open Source Software
The software developed publicly in a mutual manner is called ‘open source software’. They are available to the public without paying any accessing fees or copyright restrictions. Anyone using web can view the code, download them, update them share them for free. The programs of this software can be improved to a higher extent by sharing them with the friends.

Open Source software Development
Developing the open source software publicly is called as open source software development. The source code of those software products are available to the public to modify or change them to advance their design.

Advantages of Open Source for Website Development
Open Source always provides high-quality, secured and commercial web solutions thereby resulting in the growth of a website to an elevated position. Given below are the advantages of open source for website development:

1. Stability

For operations continuity, it provides stability.  Users can/cannot take upgrades. It changes as per the requirements of the business.  File format/version compatibility issues are less.

2. Cost-effective

Free software, perhaps zero purchase price, upgrade fees, management costs, etc.  Cost less when compared to other technologies. Starting from product purchase till the upgrades, it never cracks down your budget. The business can be promoted within low budget.

3. Audit ability

Claims that are made by the developers can be checked by anyone. Security threats and backdoor accounts can be verified by any user using the open source.

4. Quality

The numbers of developers are unrestricted. So any number of developers can work in the development process. The end-users get what they want, as they can be personalized as per their creativity. The quality of the product depends on the number of users/developers.

5. Secure

No need to check for data loss and virus as there are less flaws, bugs and viruses. As they’re open to all, the bugs are tested frequently with the number of people viewing the code. They reduce the load of the system admin. They’re least liable to hack attacks and security breaches.

6. Freedom

As per your business, you can customize the websites as there’s no vendor-lock constraint.
• Add desired functionality
• No compatibility issues
• Free internal data exchange
• Effective management of vendors
• Modifying the site as per your company needs

7. Support

Users or supporters from all over the world can give effective solutions to the problems, if raised. It doesn't costs you much.

These advantages of Open Source Software make them a most preferred choice for all websites and web applications as it is an effective solution in promoting the business to the pinnacle!

Create an Online Store using CS-Cart

Technology improvisation makes people smarter and showers heaps and heaps of benefits to the users. To top as a victorious online store, it should be capable of managing an infinite number of categories and unlimited products to gain quality response from the end users. These user-friendly websites can be utilized by the users even without any technical knowledge. The virtual interface and the exclusive features of these stores dig out the shopping needs of the people and enchant them completely.

Ecommerce, a booming industry in today’s market has lot of scope and this is mostly preferred by most of the marketers to promote their sales to a higher level. Creating an eCommerce site to attain a great reach in the bazaar without the help of the developers is possible nowadays. If you’re in search of a classy and stylish shopping cart for your startups to meet up all your needs, then CS-Cart will be the right choice for you!!!

What is CS-Cart?
Cs Cart is one of the most excellent shopping cart solutions to design an online store despite of the size of the business. This amazing tool helps to administer your online store wherever you’re. Sustain your customized online eCommerce website on your own server to manage your business with maximum comfort.

Why CS-Cart?
CS Cart is available in three standalone editions:

• Professional
• Ultimate
• Multi-vendor

This is the reason why, this tool suits all the businesses of any size. This can be used for a new standalone project or it can affix more functionality features to the existing one.

Create an Online Store using CS-Cart

If you wanna start up a business and develop a website on your own? Don’t be worried that you’re not aware of the HTML and CSS codes which are the basics for creating a websites. Your creativity is quite enough to create an online store using CS-Cart.

Follow the below instructions to craft your own desired website to augment your business:

Installation & Setup

• Create an account in CS-Cart Customer Help Desk system. Place an order for CS-Cart license. Then download the software in your system. 
• Register a domain name with the affordable CS-Cart hosting packages. 
• To offer a safer environment to all the customers, get an SSL certificate installed on the server. 
• Then install CS-Cart software on your server. 
• Give your entire company address which is given to calculate shipping costs.
• Then, list out all the languages in which the site will be available.
• Quote the prices to be displayed and the payment methods to be accepted.
• Give the mode of shipping methods.
• Create and set up taxes applicable and the necessary terms and conditions.
• Set up all general settings like minimum order amount, weight symbol, one-page checkout, extended search, etc. 
• Once the installation and setup was over, you can add the products manually or import the whole product database in CSV format.

Home Design

• Pick the captivating design from a list of design themes available. 
• Provide the essential information like title of the page, welcome message and meta-information in the home page.
• Pop in your own logo. Then in CS-Cart admin panel, change the default language to date and time format. 
• CS-Cart default functionality has to be changed, if your company has some special features. This can be done easily if a person is well-versed in Smarty Templates, MYSQL, and PHP. 

Endorsement

• This part is only to attract the customers towards your business. You can do so by adding additional and striking features like reward points, gift coupons, promotions, etc. 
• Use a resourceful and innovative content management system (CMS). This helps to store large number of products classified under various categories and this in turn, promotes your business by attracting many customers to your store.
• Different information pages like featured products, related products, bestsellers, listing as per price, listing as per category can be used to group the products in a structured way.  
• Then focus on the target audience by advertising your site on the social media. 

Kick start your own dream business and bring all your imaginations into existence in the form of an online store with all your creativity!!!

How an attractive Real Estate Company Website Design Assists in Business?

Have a virtual and visual experience of the property, which you’re gonna buy. Wherever you’re in this world, you can get a piece of land or a constructed property anywhere across the globe through the real estate websites.

Not only buying and selling, renting a property can also be quite easy through these sites. The visualization of these websites will present you the real-time feel of gawking at the property in person. If the appearance of the websites astonishes the users with its design and the necessary features, this will in turn get innumerable user responses to them thereby boosting up the real estate business of the company.

Let us take a quick glance of what are all the attractive features that are behind the successful real estate websites and how they assist in bringing up the business to the pinnacle…

Why Real Estate Business to be systematized?

No one will get satisfied easily by viewing fewer numbers of properties as it is a life-time investment. Hence, presenting a large number of properties and comparing them with one another will gives the supreme striking gold to all the buyers. With the rapid and continuous improvement in technology, real estate business also got systematized and gained sufficient response from the end users.

The evolving internet and its great features like presentation upshots with photos, videos; database of storing aplenty of data; its mode of reaching people at their place made each and every business pushed towards it to arrive at the grand success of it.

Features of attractive Real Estate Websites

To meet up the needs of every business and to handle them at ease, the websites are designed and created with most prominent features to fulfill the needs and requirements of the end users and the business firms. The features that make a real estate website a most powerful and attractive one is as follows:

• Fully automated - completely programmed and systematized
• Custom Template Web-Design - eye-catching layout to navigate easily and to present look and feel environment
• Modular & multi-tiered - goes well with real estate business of any size
• Responsive Design– one design, one website to view on all devices like mobiles, desktop, laptops, iPad, etc. 
• Multiple Listing Service – includes MLS databases to store, sort and represent to have the curb appeal
• Google Map – using Google Geo-Mapping Service to show the property locations with the exact co-ordinates of latitude and longitude
• On-page SEO – Search Engine Optimization techniques are used to make the content rich and search-engine friendly.
• Detailed Mortgage Calculator – to know the monthly finance, refinancing, interests, tax deduction and other information
• Additional modules like rental database module to display the photos of the property; real estate agents module to display the contact info of them; rental availability calendar to show the accessibility of the property and rental pricing grid to provide the pricing of rentals. 

How the above-mentioned features assist in business?

Each and every feature that are used to design a real estate website helps in their own way to broach the business to satisfy the real estate company proprietors in yielding a superior views from the customers.

Let us see in detail how each and every feature promotes the business to a higher level…

Fully automated website makes the real estate business to be highly systematized, so that it can be administered at any place across the world. Custom template web design will grab the attention of many users to engage in using the site for more information.

Modular and multi-tiered will fit any size of the real state companies. Responsive websites will offer the universal access despite of the screen resolutions of the devices. This helps the users to view the properties at any place with the device of their choice.

Multiple Listing Service gives wider access to the database and the modules present in it. This sort the properties by house type, city, town, state; and by brokers, realtors; displays the properties of similar requirements like price, sq. ft. of it.

Google Maps will give the accurate location with the correct coordinates on the map. On-page SEO will bounce the website to have high traffic as they use keywords to boast high responses and also make the content search engine friendly.

Get a piece of an own land or a rented one easily through these attractive websites which is at your reach!!!

Map your travel info with this City Mapper App! – City Spot

Never mess up with your direction and never drive for miles down the wrong road. Get to your important engagement or a gathering faster and on time by never losing your way. Navigate your world and explore your favorite hangouts around you. As rapid increase in time, we must update our self with latest tools to keep up with our rate of knots.

City Spot – a world map application for mobiles will make you explore new things in the place where you live and wherever you progress across the globe.

Now, are you sitting at the edge of your seat to know more about the interesting facts of this fantastic app? Let us spot out all the most amazing features of this map application in this below section…

City Spot
K2B Solutions, a company into and web and mobile app development feels great to launch the mobile app ‘City Spot’ which goes well with Android and iPhones.
 
If you go crazy in exploring the renowned and famed amenities in a particular place, then get a friendly companion – City Spot to be installed in your handy device. This great app lends a hand to you in finding out most famous restaurants, theaters, banks, ATM's, stations, educational institutes, parks, hotels, bars, malls, home appliance stores, travels, health and fitness centers, holy and devotional shrines, buildings near the place where you’re.

System-based specifications 
This city map application for mobile entails iOS 5.1 and it effectively runs in most recent versions of it. At the same time, City Spot for Android runs successfully in Android operating system with versions 2.3 to 4.3. This IOS app or an Android app is also compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. This mobile app helps you to spot the approximate network-based location and precise GPS location.
This striking app works effectively on all network connections like Wi-Fi, 2G and 3G networks.

Features

1. Location based augmented reality
The most striking and grand feature of City Spot is the ‘Location based augmented reality option’ in that app. This option will redirect to the camera in your friendly and handy device. Viewing the camera on a particular side will gives you a list of amenities you’re looking for. It may be a restaurant, hotel, ATM, devotional shrine, and so on.

2. GPS tracking
This location-based Android app comes with GPS tracking – a satellite based navigation system which gives the information on all the amenities like tourist spots, fuel stations, restaurants, hotels, lodges, etc. This trait gives the shortest path between two places.

3. Google Maps
If a user searches for a particular destination to travel through, City Spot will redirect to Google Maps to offer the utmost accuracy of places across the globe. This gives the speed map access and all the categories or the amenities that are in or nearby a particular place can be viewed easily and rapidly.

4. Social media
The trip details from a particular source to searched destination can be saved for future purpose and it can be shared through email, Facebook, and Twitter with your beloved buddies.

5. Trip Duration
The ‘speed of travel’, ‘distance covered’, and the ‘time duration’ taken for reaching a particular target can be measured. With this, the user can measure the time duration while on the go. By tapping the ‘Refresh Icon’ in this app will fetch the accurate current location and proceeds with your further searches.

Once an amenity is clicked, it will point out the intact list of services in that location. By clicking on the place-marker, the user can get the precise route to the marked target. Then the user can navigate in the route map by clicking the place-marker (Car icon) again to watch the current route activity.

Other Features

• You can listen to music while using City Spot 
• While using this app, the mobile users can place or pick a call. 
• All the search locations and the trip details are saved for your future purpose. 
• Covers all the countries across the globe
• This app is upgrade to its newest versions. 

Ease your voyage as much as you can and ensure that you travel in a correct pathway while on the move. Spot your preferred spot across the globe at ease with City Spot!!!

Why X Cart is preferred over Magento for eCommerce solutions?

Got drained with your unprofitable business in some other field? Come out from that and kick-start your eCommerce online business.

Develop a site using X Cart. The visualization of these site gives the paramount viewing experience to all their valuable clients by presenting a number of product catalogues in their devices wherever they’re. This helps you to deal with thousands of customers, picking many preferred products of their choice by simply adding them to the shopping cart. Placing orders at ease using this method earned a good retorts from the users of these eCommerce sites.

After selecting the web layout for your eCommerce website, next choice should be of shopping cart as they hold a vital role in them. Let us see in detail how X Cart is effective and widely used more than Magento in most of the eCommerce websites.

Magento and X Cart 
Magento – Magento Inc is the developer of this open source eCommerce web application which uses EAV model for the data storage.

X Cart - open source software developed using PHP as a base

Why X Cart not Magento for Ecommerce?
Organization Features

• X Cart is a robust open source app, and it can multiply the prospective of shopping carts persistently through consistent resources and services.
• This app always comes with substantiate user manuals and technical support. 
• Step-by-step runs the system instantaneously once the installation gets completed
• Easy to modify and competitively priced, hence it goes well with any kind of business despite of its size
• More insightful and user-friendly solution when compared with Magento 
• Cost-effective solution to meet up the budget 
• Online Store Manager can keep track of the inventory to know the remaining stock at any time.
• To facilitate the sales, it gives the detailed reports, statistics, catalog manager and much more.
• Administrator can limit the access of a user to certain goods or products.

End user benefits

• It is a search engine friendly app. 
• Before buying a product, the customers are open to the options like ‘compare’ and ‘review’. This assists the buyers in getting the best from a number of choices.
• Customers can rate a particular product. This in turn results in knowing the additional features of that product and results in high productivity.
• Integrates with the famous social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Once the product is added to the shopping cart before checkout, it leads to the payment gateways that are more secure. The most famous payment gateways that act as a mediator between the banks and the online stores are also integrated with this app. 
• Responsive interfaces provide mobile compatibility despite of the sizes of the devices. (Either desktop or mobile)
• Customers are given 24/7 assistance via Live Chat or through phone calls. 

System-based features

• It can be easily set up at shared server, because of its less resource consumption 
• As PHP Smarty Template System is used by it, programmers love to design the layout of the website. 
• Huge amount of data can be stored in MYSQL database. The database can be extended or customized as the complete source code and SQL are given.
• To make use of the static HTML and dynamic content, it has incorporated HTML Catalog functionality. 
• Increases performance and customizes uniquely to gratify the needs of the diverse online stores 
• Highly reliable and rapidly fast without any extra optimization
• A robust online store management system to store thousands of products
• Being an open source app, it can be downloaded for free of cost. At the same time, the products at the online store can be added, edited and deleted as per the convenience of the vendor of the online store. 
• Provides maximum flexibility, hence it is preferred by most of the developers. 

App’s added features

• Inventory is controlled directly and informs the purchasing sector regarding the time of restocking goods. 
• Provides hosted and self-hosted services
• Being a search-engine friendly app with rating features, the company websites are rated in the renowned search engines. 
• The online stores can be customized to be more attractive as per the choice of the online store manager to present a gorgeous site to grab the attention of more visitors or buyers.

Have the best feasible shopping experiences with X cart!!!

Is Xamarin a better choice for cross platform Mobile App Development?

iOS and Android are the most used platforms in Smartphones until the preface of Windows platform in them. Objective-C is used for iOS and Java is used for Android phones. As there are most exclusive features in each platform, the users of respective smartphone cannot avail the added feature in another platform. The mobile app developers felt hard to write code for multiple platforms. They found code replication in all the platforms. So they wanted to develop a toolset or an app which supports all the three mobile platforms and to reduce the repetition of code. As a result, Xamarin has invented to work successfully with the cross-platforms in the mobile devices.

Let us see how Xamarin supports all the three Smartphone mobile platforms with all its attractive features…

Types of Mobile Apps

Before getting started to know what is Xamarin and why it is the best option for the cross-platform mobile app development, let us take a short of different types of mobile apps.

There are three types of mobile apps that can be written by mobile application developers. They are:

1. Native apps – runs reliably and solidly on the mobile device. These apps are highly interactive. The language codes are not portable and it is difficult to retain different codes for multiple platforms and it costs much. 
2. Web-apps – run within the confines of the Web browser. There are some restrictions in accessing the parts of the hardware. As their codes are written once, they can be accessed anywhere. They are less expensive and the codes are written using CSS, HTML, and Jscript.
3. Combination Apps – A blend of both native and web apps is called as ‘combination apps’. For hardware access of the mobile, native codes are used and for web access, web codes such as CSS, HTML, and Jscript are used. Due to performance issues and poor scalability, these apps are used rarely. 

What is Xamarin?

It is a product or an app that selects the unique features of the mobile platforms and persuades the mobile apps developers to take benefit of those features offered by each platform. They can share the code across any mobile operating system without affecting the systems’ quality or performance.
It is used for designing mobile apps, testing them and categorizing them to iOS App Store and Google Play. As most of the .NET developers prefer C# for its simple mode of learning and it reaches the skilled mobile apps developers, it was chosen by Xamarin.

How it works?

The mobile app developer writes user interface code on Android and iOS separately. Then they can write reusable business logic, database codes, web services codes only once on both platforms.

Platforms supported

It powerfully integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio. The developer can choose their preferred development environment to construct mobile apps. The platforms that are supported are:

• Visual Studio on Windows
• Xamarin Studio on Windows
• Xamarin Studio on Mac

Why Xamarin for cross-platform Mobile apps development?

• If a developer is well-versed in (.NET/C#) or (JAVA/Objective-C), they can easily work with Xamarin. The reason is code of .NET and C# is compatible. 
• Developers are given complete access to all the user controls and native application programming interfaces that are available in the existing OS. 
• Less code - less errors – less bugs 
• Creates reusable components that can be reprocessed by any of the mobile platform
• Code for accessing any services can be used again smoothly on iOS, Android and Windows platforms.
• Integrated Development Environment Xamarin Studio is a top-notch IDE. This IDE develops tests, debugs, and much more operations in the cross-platforms. 
• iOS with UI and Android with SDK features creates distinct platform for each other. It take hold of the distinctive features of each platform making the apps native to their platforms. 
• Xamarin core .NET classes = Platform specific .NET classes (iOS-specific .NET classes + Android-specific .NET classes). This helps the applications to share the core logic across the different platforms
• Writes user interface code for Android and iOS, then share the business logic that can be reprocessed in both platforms
• Highly transferable database code
• Reduces development time – writing few code that are unique to each platform 
• Xamarin apps are assembled to native binary and always execute without any performance degradation.
• Application portability gives amazing user experiences
• Writing single set of code reduces the amount of testing and validates them for both platforms. 
• Working with .NET/C#, helps the developers to focus completely and develop efficiently with the best support. 
• As the shared logic created for both Android and iOS will be applicable to Windows phone and it supports them. 

Benefits of using CiviCRM for Drupal based websites

Having a huge list of appointments, meetings, and conferences is always hard to handle. Do you want to put an end to this issue by scheduling your valuable appointments, meetings, and get-togethers in a hassle-free way?  Here is the effective tool called CiviCRM helps to record and organize your important conferences, events, group activities in a structured way. Above all, you can access them wherever you’re, if they are integrated with the Drupal websites. Let us have a detailed information of Drupal based websites and the benefits of using CiviCRM in them.

Before going deeply into CiviCRM, first let us know what CMS and CRM are?

CRM and CMS

• CMS – Content Management System 

CMS is an efficient system helps in creating, organizing and managing the website contents effectively in a structured way.

There are three most popular open source CMS. They are:

1. Drupal
2. Joomla
3. Wordpress

• CRM - Contact Relationship Management System

CRM is same as your personal contacts book with some enhanced features associated with it.

What is CiviCRM?

Do you want to keep track of all the important official or personal conversations and interactions??? You can simply carry out this vital task through your websites to manage your engagements and memberships.
CiviCRM is web-based open or free source software. As its name implies, this software can be used, shared, downloaded or installed at free of cost. This software grants complete freedom to share out the original source code to all any of the employee or a person in an organization. The source code can be viewed and modified.

CiviCRM is a modular system and always works with CMS tool, as both the software tools are open source.  CiviCRM's core keeps track of contacts and groups; activities, relationships, tags and permissions. There are 9 components of CiviCRM. They are:

1. CiviContribute - keep track of contributors
2. CiviEvent - keep track of events
3. CiviMember - keep track of member lists
4. CiviCase - keep track of cases
5. CiviGrant - keep track of grants
6. CiviCampaign - keep track of campaigns
7. CiviPetition - keep track of petitions
8. CiviMail - keep track of bulk mailings
9. CiviReport - keep track of reports

What is Drupal???

Drupal is one among the three most popular open source content management systems. Drupal is back-end framework with pre-built manuscripts. Presently, millions of internet sites are using pre-built manuscripts to grab the attention of new users to have quality traffic for their sites. These pre-built scripts will give you the entire configuration you need for your website. Then, you can customize your website by simply embracing your quality content, personalized pictures, and styles in it.

Why Drupal, not Wordpress or Joomla???

Highly customized websites always entails complex content organization and scalability.This results in producing the advanced sites. Drupal is the most friendly and powerful tool capable of categorizing and organizing complex content with its robust and potent taxonomy. Most of the online stores and community platforms nowadays encompass multiple users. Those sites require complex content organization. Hence, developer-friendly tool Drupal is used.

Wordpress is user-friendly and it is ideal for creating simple web-sites with partial design options. As it lacks content management capability, this is often targeted by hackers.
Joomla allows you to develop a site with complex content and structure flexibility. It lacks SEO capability and at the same time it is not easy and intuitive.

CiviCRM Integration with CMS or Drupal

Being a free or open source software integrates with CMS (Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal) to bring in a set of useful possibilities to the websites in which they’re being used. This helps the users of the websites to carry out many activities on their own. The users can request for email updates, renew their memberships, sign up new events, share the data, edit and modify the data and so on.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based Websites

Drupal being a developer community contains a lot of modules which goes in hands with CiviCRM. CiviCRM and its components keep track of the contacts, member lists, relationships, activities, groups, events, tags and permissions, petitions, grants, contributors, cases, campaigns, reports, and bulk mailings in the Drupal-based websites.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based websites are listed below:

• Expands your website’s operating capabilities.
• Scalability and Security
• Views: display website content. 

CiviCRM integrates with Drupal Views and allows CiviCRM data to be shown on your website. One can create CRMData using views in structure section which is located in Drupal Administrative menu

• Calendar Module: displays calendars on your website
• Webform Module: offers extensive options in form submission. 
• Organic Groups CiviCRM module: after integration of Drupal Users with CiviCRM, the Drupal group can be used for mailings, tracking address information, tracking activities or anything else normally done with CiviCRM contacts.
• CiviGroup Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for donors and staff. 
• CiviMember Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for organization members.

Stop worrying in handling the bulk of contacts and records!!! Create an effective and powerful planner cum organizer and pre-built website to efficiently handle your private conversations safely using Drupal integrated with CiviCRM!!!

Are Native Mobile Apps Really Better Than Web Apps?

In general, there is a perception that native mobile applications can be directly downloaded from the Play Store and easily installed on your mobile devices. Therefore, native applications are considered as more user-friendly than web applications, especially in terms of their general features. Moreover, the higher sales figures of native apps also give great evidence for this view.

Are native mobile applications really better than web applications? Let us take a look:

Creation:
When concerning about the process of mobile application development, native applications do win hands down. As the native apps are customized for various mobile platforms, the entire coding is usually done by the in-house developers of mobile app development companies. Therefore, finding out bugs and releasing updates, and also monitoring the application analytics are easy and guaranteed.

Speed:
If you buy and install an application from an iPhone or a Blackberry application development company, it automatically becomes a part of your mobile device’s built-in features. Also, launching the applications on compatible handsets generally takes only a few seconds. However, web applications are typically slower as they require strong internet connectivity all the time.

Cost Factor:
From the perspective of professional mobile app developers, the cost of native mobile app development is considerably higher than the cost of web application development. On the other hand, the applications that are compatible across various different platforms can be rather pricey. Also, the time taken to build prototypes of native applications is also higher.

Usability:
According to the professionals from leading Android or iPhone mobile application development company, both web applications and native applications can be user-friendly. However, the native applications seem to have the edge here, as they can be seamlessly integrated with the mobile camera, audio/video recorder, and another handheld device features.

App Store Approval:
Suppose, if a mobile app development company has developed a new mobile application, then the company has to get approval for that application in order to display at the online app stores. Even then, there is no guarantee that the new application would be able to gain the interest of many numbers of users. However, web applications do not require such store approval; hence it is easy for the development company to promote the web applications.

Security:
As mobile applications are tested for their quality and approved by leading app stores, they are completely bug-free and secure. However, no such assurance is available for web applications, even though the popular web applications can be easily trusted.

Requirement of Internal Memory:
Native applications usually require a certain amount of memory space in handsets, especially for functioning in an efficient manner. This is the reason why a great importance is given when selecting a mobile application development framework that never consume too much of memory on mobile phones. Conversely, web applications do not require any extra memory space to be launched and operated.

Monitoring Application Performance:
A mobile app development company that is expertise in native application creation would generally have to build multiple versions of each application, depending on the platform on which it would be used. Also, the analytics for each and every native application must be tracked in order to get an idea about how the application is performing. When concerning about web applications, they generally have only one version that makes performance tracking every easy.

Finding the Necessary Applications:
With the range of web applications available, sometimes it becomes little tricky for users to find the ones that they generally need on their mobile phones. There is no confusion regarding native applications as they are systematically displayed on the Apple Play Store, Android Store and the Blackberry App Store. Choosing and downloading native applications are not very difficult than searching for appropriate web applications.

Maintenance:
Since native mobile applications basically require customized coding for various different platforms, their maintenance seems to be a little more challenging than web applications. As web applications have a cross-platform single coding involved, making changes or modifications is easier. Also, the maintenance cost of web applications is also lower compared to the cost of native applications.

In terms of both performance and quality, the native applications are mostly better than web applications. Also, native applications offer more user-friendly advantages when compared to web applications even though the later have several positive points of their own.

HTML5 and CSS3 – Lift up your web design to next level

HTML5 and CSS3 are the new techniques which are considered as the future of web development. However, you don’t have to wait to start using them for your web development. Because, even though the specification is still in development, most contemporary browsers and mobile devices already support these techniques.

Gone are the days when adding additional markup just to design a button in a different way or stripe tables. Now, you have to learn how to use HTML5 and CSS3 new markup to create a better structure for your website content and also better interfaces for your forms.

Using HTML5 and CSS3, you can able to embed audio, video and vector graphics into your web pages without using Flash. You can find how web sockets, cross-document messaging, client-side storage, and offline caching can make your modern web development easy, also you can discover how CSS3 makes it into style sections of your web page. You will get a clear idea about both the developing solutions that are backwards compatible and accessible.

HTML5:
HTML5 is the most recent version of Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. This technology is currently supported by only a few numbers of browsers, hoping to see more in usage by the next year. However, the features that are available now are a best possible way to become acquainted with HTML5 and add some fantastic elements to your website.
To avoid many bugs and crashes, refuse to allow Flash on the iOS and also learn how to use the more intricate features of HTML5 to develop apps and iOS-friendly websites. As Google is rolling out an HTML5-friendly version of YouTube, many web and mobile app developers have started to see how important this technique will become in the near future.
Every browser may support various features of HTML5 that makes it mandatory for those interested in programming to figure out which features they require and which will be supported by various different browsers.

Features of HTML5:
• Any HTML5 syntax needs a doctype that must be specified, so that the browser can provide the web page in standards mode. One important thing is that the doctype declaration has also been made simpler from previous HTML. Hence, it is now just: <!DOCTYPE html>
• HTML5 provides an outstanding support to both audio and visual. As soon as all browsers support HTML5, you can be able to easily add audio and video to your website without the need of other plugins.
• Using HTML5, you can easily edit the content of your website. Use the attribute “contenteditable” to effortlessly change your content on your website. To do this, just add contenteditable=“true” to any element.
• You can use the canvas element to bypass Photoshop in order to make your 2D images and directly add them in your code.
• The application cache allows you to easily navigate web applications, even though you are offline.

Why use HTML5?
• HTML5 gives you more flexibility when creating your website.
• As HTML5 generally implements Web sockets. Hence, it will load much faster than its older version.
• Using HTML5, you can create universal applications for all mobile devices. Therefore, mobile phone applications will become much more accessible if they are written in HTML5.
• Audio, video and images are all effortlessly written perfectly into the code. This eliminates the need for any other third-party software like Flash.
• HTML5 is growing more rapidly and this will be resulted in a number of features that will leave traditional websites looking outdated.
• As HTML5 is generally built on HTML4, the old markup can able to stay in place as you develop the new features.
• Both HTML5 and CSS3 together will provide some great designer credibility.

CSS 3:
CSS3 or Cascading Style Sheet 3 is a style sheet language that specifies style formatting, such as color, font, size and layout, for websites. This technique is mostly used in HTML pages. However, unlike HTML, CSS mainly focuses on the design and style of a website rather than its content. The main purpose of using CSS is to make changes on every page on a website without rewriting the code.
Even though CSS3 is not supported by all browsers that are available now, it is becoming very popular because it makes website changes so much easier, when compared with its previous version or JavaScript plugins.
CSS3 provides many exciting new features that help you to enhance the appearance of a website. Using CSS3, you can able to improve the functionality and appearance of your website exponentially.

Features of CSS3:
• Using CSS3, you can easily create a shadow around an element by using the same code, and also be able to change the color, position, and blur of that shadow.
• Rounded corners appear more user-friendly than square boxes. Using CSS3, you can apply this effect to HTML elements.
• Just like normal text, you can be able to add a shadow to HTML text that can be highlighted. Using CSS3, you can change the shadow blur, the shadow angle, and the shadow color in CSS.
• The property “opacity” can make elements more transparent. You can set the opacity of an image in an image editor and then save it with transparency enabled.
• With CSS3, you can create gradients right in the browser as soon as you load the web page.

Why use CSS3?
In fact, there is no high demand of innovation that CSS3 was developed, however, the possibilities that CSS3 could be able to provide for us. Before CSS3 has been introduced, web designers can able to create CSS to meet the expected result using images and markup. But, now, with CSS3, they can be able to create the same effects as layout images and extra markup with less effort and more dynamics. This not only helps in making changes easily, but also decreases the size of a web page with less number of images.

Conclusion:
Hence, the combination of both HTML5 and CSS3 are very powerful and can create incredible, high-quality solutions. So, it is mandatory for you to learn them and start using them from today, otherwise you will fall behind your competitors.