Apple AirPrint - Does it mean a Wifi!

Apple AirPrint AirPrint – an exclusive feature that helps you print files directly from your iDevice. Sometimes it is misunderstood as Wi-Fi device, but AirPrint is just a application kind of feature that every iDevice starting from OS X Lion and iOS 4.2.1 has

As a market leader, K2B Solutions has reached the heights on the internet peak offering creative solutions for web services like Website designing and development, Mobile apps development and Digital marketing. We have a team of very innovative and skilled professionals who can do miracle in no time. Your search for a quality web service provider ends here.

Looking to learn AngularJS - Checkout some of it's highlighting features!

AngularJS was created by Google, with the concept of providing a MVC framework that helped developers build web applications well laid architecture and easy maintenance capabilities. The following are a list of features and capabilities of the Angular.

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How to use wordpress as CMS for creating Corporate Microsites?

Microsite – What’s It?

What are the ways to create animation using CSS3?

The launch of CSS3 was pinnacle to the current change in usage of CSS for developing web animations. Before which, people used resources such as Flash and JavaScript for designing and developing such animations, which includes animated images. There were certain aspects to CSS3 that made creating animations through it so much easier and so much fun. Let’s have a brief look at these aspects now.

To begin with, there are two components - the “styles” and “keyframes”. These components make using CSS an apt option for developing animations. How they make it happen is as follows:

• A “style” describes the CSS animation.
• A “keyframe” indicates the flow of animation styles from beginning through the end.

Advantages of CSS3 Animations

The following three features are major advantages, which the CSS animations have over other traditional animation techniques (which are script-driven).

• CSS makes it easy to create simple animations; also, one would not need to have knowledge on JavaScript or similar tools to work with CSS.
  
• Unlike JavaScript animations, which runs poorly even the simple animations (when not well made), the CSS animations run really well even when the system’s under moderate load. This is made possible by the rendering engine, which utilizes frame-skipping techniques to maintain performance and smoothness.
  
• Having the browsers themselves control the flow of animations (such as animation refresh rates, etc), has lead to best performance optimization and smoother animation flow.

Creating the Animations

Creating a sequence of CSS animation involves using the style component to set the animation’s properties and sub-properties. You get to configure the duration and timing of the animation, along with details related to how the sequence of animation should progress. But, you do not get to configure the appearance of these animations using the style, for which purpose you will be using the @keyframes component.

CSS Style

The following are the style properties & sub-properties

• animation-delay: This helps configure the time delay between different elements of the loaded animation and the sequential animations.
• animation-direction: This configuration sets the direction of individual animations, and also states if the particular animation will repeat itself in the same sequence or in a different direction on its consecutive runs.
• animation-duration: Sets the time an animation would take to complete its single cycle.
• animation-iteration-count: Sets the number of times an animation would repeat itself. If set to infinite, the animation would go on indefinitely.
• animation-name: This specifies the at-rule name, which describes an animation’s keyframes.
• animation-play-state: You can configure an animation’s pause/play status.
• animation-timing-function: With this configuration, you can establish the acceleration curves of the animation, setting its keyframes transitions.
• animation-fill-mode: This configures the values applied to an animation, (before & after it’s execution).

CSS @keyframes

As mentioned before, the keyframes allow you to configure the animation’s appearance. For this, you will need to setup at least two (at-rule) keyframes. These keyframes represent how individual elements of the animation render themselves within a set time frame.

This time frame is denoted by a “percentage” system by the keyframes. A 0% represents the start of an animation, and 100% represents the finish; they are given as from/0% and to/100% respectively. Though both these are optional, they are very important, and thus, the browser by default computes all the attributes of the animation and starts and finishes it accordingly, when the values are not provided.

The following are CSS3 animation examples, which should give you a brief understanding of how this works.

Example 1:
25% {
  font-size: 200%;
  margin-right: 75%;
  width: 200%;
}

This example shows that at 25% of the animation, the header will have the right margin at 75%, with the width being 200%.

Example 2:
from {
  margin-right: 100%;
  width: 500%;
}
 to {
  margin-right: 0%;
  width: 100%;
}

This example has two keyframes; first occurring at 0% and the second at 100% (by default, since the values aren’t provided); this effectively starts and finishes an animation. The right margin is at 100% with a width of 500% at the start of the animation, and ends at 0% of the right margin with 100% width. Therefore, the browser animates a header from left edge to the right edge.

With that, by including additional keyframes you can add intermediate steps and thus, amend the CSS3 animations as per your requirements.

Few good Tricks To Improve Your WordPress Theme

Improve your WordPress Themes

In WordPress, the “Themes” play a vital part in making one’s site look unique and impressive. To that fact, there are thousands of themes available for the users to choose from and download, these are either offered for free or for a premium. However, did you know all these themes can be further tweaked in order to get better optimization, features or customization?

Well, let’s have a look at few simple yet effective tweaks that can be done to your WordPress themes, to offer better and safer experience to your website visitors.

Theme Images

Images are the primary part of most themes; they are on the logos, the backgrounds, icons and so on. However, WordPress theme developers sometimes fail to realize that their high resolution/high quality images are actually doing more bad to the theme users than good.

How? A high resolution image may make the theme look very pretty and luring, but, what they are also doing is, drastically increasing the load time of these images. When we factor that there are multiple images within a webpage; we can assume how greatly they would affect the total load time or bandwidth consumption - resulting in a very slow website altogether, which we don’t want.

Hence, by optimizing these images we can ensure for a better web experience for our website users. To do that we need to use photo editing tools (for example “Photoshop”), and reduce the image’s resolution through quality settings. Lowering the resolution up to the point just before where the image starts to have a hit on its color or quality would be your sweet spot. Also, some tools offer you options to reduce image file size without making much change to the image’s quality.

This should effectively speedup the theme.

PHP Flush

Like the above step, the purpose of this function is to make your WordPress blog load faster too. A PHP flush should be added immediately after the header, this forces the server to send the header content before rest of the website.

<?php flush(); ?>

What this does is give the browser enough time to load stylesheets in the header reference when it’s waiting for other contents of the webpages to load.

Favicon

Favicon makes your website look professional. But, what is a favicon? It is the icon that you see on the browser’s address bars. Some themes do not come with it by default, in-order to add one you can do the following.

<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

The “href” refers to the favicon file. Adding this code within the header.php found inside the theme’s directory should get your icon up on the bar.

Theme Security

Hackers and other such malicious users can take advantage of various weaknesses within a specific version of the WordPress to attack your website. What makes it ironic is that, your WordPress version is displayed right on the header.

So, what do you do? There’re few steps you can take to get your website protected – that is by removing the displayed version number altogether. The generator code is placed within the <head> tags of the theme.

Step 1

• Check if the following line is present in the header.php <meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>" />
• If yes, then remove it, as it prints the version number as the <meta> tag.

Step 2

• Now, under functions.php (you can create one if it does not exist, using “source code editor”) past the following: <?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>
• This ensures that the version number won’t be available through wp_head()

Login Errors

Hiding your login errors is another way of protecting your themes too. The reason being that when a person types in a wrong password or a wrong username this error code reveals the exact type of error to the users.

That is; when one type’s in a wrong username the message states its so, giving the potential hacker a confirmed feedback. And when the password alone is wrong, it states that too, ensuring to them that a username is valid, which only requires from them to hack for the password.

So, to remove this - add the following line under functions.php.

add_filter('login_errors', create_function('$a', "return null;"));

Making these minor changes to your wordpress theme, will ensure that it better optimized for safer and faster browsing experience.

Why to choose ruby on rails to develop a website?

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a hot open source web app framework that’s written using the Ruby language - a general purpose programming language that was developed to keep the object-oriented part of coding intact. Through recent years the number of dedicated followers of Ruby on Rails has increased by large. It’s being enthusiastically used by web app developers who appreciate the clean and elegant coding structure when programming.

This framework allows for us to run web applications and provides us with a platform to build new web pages on. With that you can gather information from the server, query the database or manage templates under a secure interface using the ruby on rails CMS (Content Management System).

Also, the Rails framework gives a simplified and easier approach towards developing a website or an app, by coming up with abstracts for common and repetitive tasks. This enables Ruby on Rails developers to deliver speedier projects, thus making it a serious contender to the position held by PHP. Rightly so you can find numerous arguments over which one is better for the development of their next website. Now, let’s have a look at what makes Ruby on Rails the right choice.

Facts of Ruby on Rails

Here are few statements that you hear often when the conversation is about RoR.

1. The Framework of RoR is mature” - this is true as the Ruby is built on a much advanced foundation, thus granting us a much easier approach towards developing a high-end product faster and more efficiently. Also, being built on top of solid foundation allows for it to offer a stable maintenance solution. In comparison a PHP website is very weak to tweaks and changes, as the coding most often do not follow a fixed structuring making it very hard for future modifications or additions.
   
   Ruby offers lots of open source contents that are extremely helpful in cutting down on initial development costs, which proves to be game-changer in multiple occasions, for many developers.
   
   
2. “It’s difficult to write bad codes in RoR” this may seem fictional, however that’s very close to reality. Again taking PHP as an example - one of the major advantages of PHP was that it was very easy to pick up and start working with, this enabled lot of developers to flush in with many PHP products under least amount of time. But, trouble brew when bugs where discovered or when contents where needed to be amended, that’s when the easy its structuring proved to also be its major down point.
   
   Now with Ruby on Rails, the rules are strict and structure and flow of coding is mature. This allows for easy changes and bug fixing, which means lower maintenance cost. RoR can be said as – “hard work to begin, but easy work to sustain”. This brings to the next fact.
   
   
3. “RoR has a very steep learning curve” Yes, that’s true too, like mentioned above this fact about Ruby on Rails, actually proves to be its advantage. You don’t have to worry as-much about the quality of projects coming out of a RoR developer, as with other easy to learn development tools. One cannot get away with bad coding here, thus, this toughness filters all the posers from the skilled developers.

Note: Use of agile development is recommended by the Ruby community, for apps with ever-changing requirements.

Features of Ruby on Rails

Here’s a list of features that make RoR a very potent tool for programmers.

• The open source nature of ruby on rails provides the programmers with a vast library of codes, which allows for fasters and more efficient programming.
• The programming structure of RoR is consistent throughout, that allow rails developers to move between different projects.
• The framework of Rails makes it easy for a Ruby developer to make changes to the application as and when needed, without much trouble.
• Ruby programming uses a very readable coding style, such that they themselves serve as documents for other developers or future references.
• Rails being open source requires no licensing, thus leaving you to focus your cost on rails hosting services and kind.

However, there are certain down sides to Ruby on Rails as well, which includes that fact that not all website hosts support Rails at the moment. This is because Rails is resource intensive when in comparison to the other popular programming tool - the PHP. Then, unlike Java or PHP, Rails is not as popular either, it is gaining in popularity but, has a long way to go. Finally Rails isn’t as fast as related programming tools – Java or C.

Conclusion

Despite these minor setbacks Ruby on Rails has in offer a very elegant and powerful development tool that is apt for today’s modern website and mobile application needs; hence, as a reputed developer we provide you with just that.

Custom Website Blog Vs Open Source Website Blog, Which one would be better?

In current scenario it is only natural that we expect every business to have an online presence. And if you are someone owning a business and are catching-up with this trend now, you might be in for a shock when you personally experience its potential.

So, when you are ready to get your business online and have decide to develop a website, one of the first choices you will be making is deciding on what type of platform you will be building your website on - an open source or a custom one. Before we go ahead and choose one, let’s understand their differences and what they have in offer.

But first we need to know what a “CMS” is.

CMS - Content Management System

A CMS is the system upon which your website is built and is the platform which is used for creating, publishing, managing and deleting contents on your website. This includes text, media, coding, etc; however, knowledge on coding is not mandatory as CMS is very simple to operate - almost as simple as editing one’s document. Now, let us go back to the two different types.

Open Source Websites Blog: An open source website blog uses the codes that are already available for the public. One can uses these codes for editing as well as redistribution. These types of systems are constantly under improvement and development by the community comprising of thousands of people; all contributing newer and more efficient solutions to the pool.

• The main advantage in using open source websites is that you get a website for the least budget. Having a designer work on a website would defiantly cost you most that what you would be spending for get a website up and running using an open source.
• The usability of these websites are very flexible and anybody can take it upon themselves to edit and modify their websites. Adding new pages, removing continents cannot be easier.
• The overall time it takes to get your website to the public is a lot shorter than in comparison with custom websites. You do not need for the developers to provide individual codes for your website, most are immediately available and the rest requires easy edits to customize to your needs. 
• No matter how many pages or how different your pages you require, all are done using the templates, which offers you with a consistent output.
• With just addition of few plug-inns you can make your website as functional and unique as you want, however not to the precision of a custom website blog, but enough for most.
• Adding and editing media is so much easier with open source websites, as they were practically designed to offer you with such opportunities and features.
• Developing your website is more fun through this method, as most to all options can be edited and molded by you to your personal liking. Thus, enjoy the DIY feel without having to know anything about coding or programming. It’s easy to lean interface and user-friendly interaction allow for you to enjoy your website development.

Custom Websites Blog: The custom platforms use privately held codes that are distributed and maintained by individual owners. These types of systems are thus developed and improved up-on, as per these owners’ personal judgments.

• The main aspect of using a custom websites is that, they can be designed exactly to one’s desire. The templates can be designed to function and look as unique as possible, to an extent beyond what is possible through open source websites, hence you can be sure that no other website is going to look like yours. Also, there are options for you to purchase these individual templates such that no one else will be able to imitate or copy your website design.
• Being able to customize the website beyond the concepts of templates allows for you to direct your customers the way you want. Thus, the ability to control and steer your customers will play an important role in improving business through your website.
• Using the custom codes are the most effective and efficient way to get a website done, as no unnecessary aspects to the website are added. They are more personable and are most apt for working towards improving your web-traffic with search engine optimization (SEO).
• Having a custom website blog allows for you to structure your website to fulfill your individual needs instead of working around and finding a compromise.

These are few brief understanding of the differences between the Custom Website Blog and Open Source Website Blog. Which is better?..depends upon your personal needs. When you are looking for a website that is easy to build, fun to develop and fast to modify then open source website blog would be your best choice. However, if you want a very personalized websites that is most unique, more secure and ultimately you do not mind the extra cost than you better opt for custom website blogs. Whichever your choice is, we offer you both these services.

Teach and Learn through Moodle based e-learning platform

Moodle is an e-Learning platform that was released to the public in August of 2002 as a free software that’s available to anyone for download. Moodle the abbreviation for “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment” is a learning platform that was designed to offer the best interactive learning experience for the users. Both the trainers and the learners benefit from its simple yet feature rich environment, which are customizable and effective at the same time. All these traits are essential and make for a good e-learning platform. Due to which, the number of customized versions of this software available to the public has increased to tens of thousands over the years.

Moodle being a very interactive tool allows for the trainers as well as the learners to work in co-ordination with each other, creating unique online course structures that are customized exactly to their specific wants. The flexibility of this continually evolving platform which is molded constantly to attain fineness and credibility is what has brought 70+ million dedicated users to it.

Teaching and Learning with moodle

The reasons behind why moodle is the most preferred e-learning platform for great many users, are numerous; let’s have a look at some of the important ones and how it influences teaching or learning.

Reliability: This tool has been around for over a decade now, and during these years has undergone numerous changes, to become what is now very reliable and proven resource. From Institutions to Universities, both small and big have chosen to use moodle as their teaching platform; this shows us how trusted this e-learning tool is.

Free License: This being an open-source software, anyone can downloaded it for both commercial or non-commercial usage without any licensing fee. As, the tool can be modified and extended to the user’s specific needs, its cost-effectiveness is its major benefit for trainers and institutes.

Mobility: This is a web-based platform and thus accessible from anywhere and on any device, making its contents reachable by anyone with an internet connection. It’s cross browser compatible and is also available in responsive themes for better usability making moodle a perfect learning tool for students on the move.

Security: One of the major concerns of critics was its security and privacy capabilities. However, through constant updates and regular checks, the moodle platform has proven to be very strong against unauthorized usage, data loss and similar misuses. This e-learning platform is thus ideal for trainers and the learners looking for a safe medium.

Multilingual: Moodle is available in multiple languages, thus apt for students of different culture and various parts of the world. The community is responsible for taking moodle beyond the limitations of its base language. Now the e-learners can opt for available 120+ languages.

Community: And then the most important aspect of all “the community” this is the driving force behind moodle’s success as a prominent Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The dedicated international community provides continual support and intense bug fixes, guarantying a resource that’s fit for training institutes and organizations for small and large scale.

A Complete Package: Moodle has undergone years of development on various fronts to make it a complete tool-set for all types of online courses. Users can configure the very core of this tool and enable or disable its various features to make it the package they would want to support. The package guarantees resource for the following features:

• Save a lot on course materials
• Interactive homework/assignments
• Little to no paperwork
• Evaluation of skills are fully customizable
• Wide range of learning activities
• YouTube video embedding
• Feedbacks and details are stored meticulously 
• Automated grade-books

With these collective attributes, moodle LMS (Learning Management System) serves its users with the best of online learning and training environment.

An introduction to WebRTC and how it will improve revenue opportunities for your company?

Introduction to WebRTC

WebRTC is a JavaScript API (Application Programming Interface) that’s designed to support developers in adding Real-Time Communication (RTC) features such as data sharing and voice/video streaming directly into the browsers, thus making them an integral part of these browsers.

This way, the users wouldn’t have to download and install different plug-ins to their individual browsers in-order to experience these real-time communications. As these plug-ins are not only a hassle to the end-users but also to the developers, because they needed to invest a ton of money into funding these plug-ins’ maintains and monitoring for consistent stability and functionality across multiple browsers working under different operating systems.

With this technology - the various devices that you use on a day-to-day basis, like the smart phones, TVs, computers and the near-future wearable technologies can all interact between each other and exchange data, voice and videos seamlessly on a real-time basis via the internet irrespective of their difference in base platforms.

A Brief History

This concept of WebRTC came to life at the Google; about a year after the launch of Google Chrome the Chrome team wanted a system that would provide this real-time communication features. However, the results they came up with weren’t satisfactory and Google released their WebRTC to the public in May of 2011 as an open-source project.

Since then there has been thousands of potential endpoints on development to enhance and make-real the visions for WebRTC, this includes contributions from Ericsson, Mozilla and AT&T. Now, with its inclusion within the latest markup language - the HTML 5 - the browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Opera have all incorporated the WebRTC within their browser experience, while Internet Explorer and Safari are yet to catch-up, as of Sep 2014.

Prospective Future

So, we know that this new technology can bring about a mountain of changes to the ways we perceive peer to peer interactions. But, how these changes will influence or improve your revenue opportunities? – Here, grab a peek!

1) Long Distance Business Communication

Imagine a call center without any telephones - both in physical or on a desktop form!! Impossible?

Well, it may seem so at the moment, but that’s exactly what the concept behind WebRCT is all about. The developers hope to achieve a real-time communications infrastructure that enables all peer to peer interactions within a default browser’s interface.

The possibilities are beyond call centers and similar businesses; all organization can make use of its potential and maximize their efficiency by completely eliminating the needs for telephonic or desktop based phone infrastructures and accordingly control their revenue to a great extent. This technology is thus considered by many as a game changer.

Having a browser that can by default provide you with voice/video calling features and P2P file sharing facilities, without the need for additional plug-ins or any other third party software programs is defiantly a boost for any businesses, especially those companies that have limited budget for availing these services.

2) Advance Conferencing for Business Meets

A long distance video conference usually comprises of multiple participants interacting from different locations via a common tool, which typically relays all their voices echoing from a single speaker, but this leaves a mess of voices. However, all this could change with WebRTC “Spatial Conferencing” a concept that aims to bring about a field of depth in the communications, such that the participants can pinpoint the each other location.

This is achieved by placing a small speaker in-front of the participants, these speakers produce a full three dimensional sound for each participants as per their locations. This gives the listener a clear perspective of individual voices.

This technology thus is very efficient at giving the users a feel of live meeting within a conference room, making the video interactions seamless and pleasant.

3) Acute File Transferring System

Another important aspect of WebRTC is its ability to transfer files between any browsers; be it on desktop or mobile. The possibilities are endless, as the freedom to transfer files across multiple devices and operating systems solves various problems associated with plug-ins and compatibilities.

For companies, this feature can save a lot of hassle and help enhance their productivity.

Conclusion

These are some of the feature of WebRTC that show great potential, in improving our business lifestyle and allowing us to focus on more important tasks.

What’s best for your business – Website Builder or Web Designer?

Every business at one point or another will have to look into creating a website for themselves in order to be competent enough in this current scenario. So when that is under consideration, one of the first things that crops into their mind is – Do I need a hire a Web Designer to design and develop my website or will I be able to handle it all by myself using a Web Builder software?

Well read ahead to understand their ups and downs before you can decide that for yourself. But first let’s have a look at what web building software is all about and why some prefer this over hiring a web designer.

Website Builder:

A website builder software, is a tool that allows the users to design their own website without them requiring to have any knowledge on website development/designing or most importantly on coding. Yes, anyone can take-up website designing task and go ahead and start designing one right from the word go. You do not need prior experience or specific education to take on designing your own website using these simple tools.

These kind of tools can be categorized under two types; 1) the online type and 2) the offline type.

• An online type is the one where the web hosting company itself provides you with dedicated tools for you to develop your website on (the more complex versions of these online tools are called the Content Management Systems (CMS)).
• The offline ones are those where you use a software to develop your website and then upload them onto a host to publish your new website.

The tools themselves are designed to be easy to use, such as choosing form different available options to finish you entire website design. So, these tools offer you a limited number of different layouts and few personalization options to make yours feel unique. Apart from these few personalization options though, you wouldn’t get much of customization out of a standard website builder.

However, using the more complex tools (CMS) offered by some webhosting companies, you could increase these customizations and user experiences up by few notches.

• Ease to use
• Quicker to design
• Smaller Budget

These are some of the widespread reasons behind why people choose website builders over hiring web designers.

So, then why do still others including top corporate go with hired web designers?

Web Designer:

Hired web designers are experts in the field of “web development” and “web designing”.  Though both fall under a single service, their roles are different. Here’s a brief:

• Web Development: This involves all the back-end processes of the website - such as coding and programming. Required for running and sustaining a website impeccably.
• Web Designing: On the other hand this involves all the front-end processes of the website - such as its interface and the layout designs. Most visual aspects of a website.

However, on hiring web designers you get both of these services – mostly.

Before we go ahead with the advantages of using a web designer, let’s have a quick look at some of its major down sides – budget, and ofcourse without the need to mention, the time it takes to completely design a website.

When both of these aren’t your primary concerns (which is not so, majority of the times), then let’s go ahead with the advantages.

What you lose in terms of budget you get back in with ton of options and elements - such as great customization/personalization possibilities, top features, high security, professional build, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so on and so forth. All of which are essential for a website to become a great website.

Also, all these options impact your brand development on the web to a great extent.

• High Quality
• Professional Website
• Great Flexibility
• Secure

These are some of the reasons why people go for hiring a web designer.

Conclusion:

Now, that you have a brief idea into the working of both these options – what should you choose?

That entirely depends upon the reasons behind your website. If it’s a business website that’s just going to your online visiting card, and you wouldn’t want to spend too much on it, either money or time then website builder would be the better choice.

However, if yours is a business that involves a lot of online presence, and when your online branding is going to be the pinnacle of your business’s success, then it is always ideal for you to hire a good web designer to develop your website.