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OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company backed by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Sam Altman, et al., released its third generation of language prediction model (GPT-3) into the open-source wild. Language models allow computers to supply random-ish sentences of roughly an equivalent length and grammatical structure as those during a given body of the text.

OpenAI GPT-3 will eventually be widely wont to pretend the author of a text may be a person of interest, with unpredictable and amusing effects on various communities. It may spark an ingenious gold rush among talented amateurs to similar coach models and adapt them to a spread of purposes, including false news, “researched journalism,” advertising, politics, and propaganda.

But what’s happening under the hood of this incredible model?

What is OpenAI’s GPT-3 Language?

GPT-3 may be a neural-network-powered language model. A language model may be a model that predicts the likelihood of a sentence existing within the world.

Like most other language models, GPT-3 is elegantly trained on an unlabeled text dataset (in this case, the training data includes, among others Common Crawl and Wikipedia). Words or phrases are randomly far from the text, and therefore the model must learn to fill them in using only the encompassing words as context. It’s an easy training task that leads to a generalizable and robust model.

The GPT-3 model architecture itself may be a transformer-based neural network. This architecture became popular around 2–3 years ago and is the basis for the favored NLP model BERT and GPT-3’s predecessor, GPT-2. From an architecture perspective, GPT-3 isn’t very novel!

What makes it so unique and magical?

IT’S BIG. I mean big. With 175 billion parameters, it’s the essential language model ever created (an order of magnitude larger than its nearest competitor!) and was trained on the most critical dataset of any language model. This, it appears, is that the main reason GPT-3 is so impressively “smart” and human-sounding.

But here’s the magical part. As a result of its humongous size, GPT-3 can do what no other model can do (well): perform specific tasks with non-unique tuning. you’ll ask GPT-3 to be a translator, a programmer, a poet, or a famous author, and it can roll in the hay with its user (you) providing fewer than ten training examples. Damn.

This is what makes GPT-3 so exciting to machine learning practitioners. Other language models (like BERT) require an elaborate fine-tuning step in which you gather thousands of samples of (say) French-English sentence pairs to show it how to do the translation. To adapt BERT to a selected task (like translation, summarization, spam detection, etc.), you’ve got to travel out and find an outsized training dataset (on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of examples), which may be cumbersome or sometimes impossible, counting on the task. With GPT-3, you don’t get to do this fine-tuning step. This is often the guts of it. It gets people excited about GPT-3: custom language tasks without training data.

Today, GPT-3 is privately beta, but the community cannot wait to urge their hands thereon.

The eCommerce industry is on the peak during the pandemic days and is expected to grow at a rapid pace in the coming years. There are many new techniques available in the market to make E-commerce stores more advanced.

Integrating ERPNext with an E-commerce store helps with smooth data flow and proper stock management. ERPNext is a fully-featured business management solution that helps SMEs (Small & Medium Entrepreneurs) record all the business transactions in one system. And also it’s open-source.

Through ERPNext Services, it’s a simple thing for giant E-commerce stores to keep track of money flow in multiple cities, countries, and companies. Even today, the small and enormous business is now satisfied to use ERPNext software in their firms today.

Benefits of ERPNext Services for eCommerce stores:

· Do accounts to stay track of sales/ purchases

· Pays taxes to the govt sector.

· Pay their employees monthly salaries.

· Manage deliveries within promised time slices.

· Deliver quality goods and services to their precious customer.

· Communicate with customers, and resolve their problems and keep happy customers.

How ERPNext Integration Helps Ecommerce Business to Grow?

E-Commerce has become a revolutionized way of selling the products at relatively low cost. In recent years, many businesses have opted for keeping a web storefront alongside their brick and mortar stores. In contrast, many companies consider an e-commerce platform and ERP software as two separate components, making it challenging to manage both the platforms. With no communication between the platforms, businesses miss out on the advantages of an integrated ERP system. 

With the integration of the ERP system in E-commerce stores, one can easily manage web sales along with side efficient internal business functional management.

Here are some advantages of ERPNext integration with eCommerce store:

Improves Functionality:

The integration of ERP software initiates the supply of real-time data to the storefront, allowing customers to look at and access the knowledge concerning the available inventory, order status, and shipment tracking details using the lot/serial or other tracking numbers. This helps in reducing the value of operations and improving the customer experience together with your storefront.

Reduces the Operational cost: 

With ERPNext integration, it is easy to maintain updated sales information. An ERP system offers all the details regarding web sales information and also updates about online transactions. 

The updated web sales information and inventory details help forecast and adequately plan the acquisition, which reduces the operational inventory cost. It is easy to track the inventory in real-time and forecast what proportion stock you would like in the future.

Generate financial reports:

An E-commerce application can quickly generate financial reports on sales. Via integrates E-commerce with an ERP. The top user can move a step ahead, as ERP software provides record, P/L Statement, balance, Cash Flow, etc. ensuring transparency about online transactions and financial information across the organization.

Increase productivity and saves time: 

The integrated ERP software streamlines multiple business processes, reducing the human resource involvement within the business processes. The workers do not need to input files from one platform to a different manually (e.g., shipping info, inventory levels, product info); instead, communication takes place automatically. This protects time and money and also makes employees liberal to be productive in other ways.

Also, all the online sales orders will get timely integrated into the ERP system. Also, an ERP user can instantly track the order and begin further processing. With ERP software integration, the order fulfilment cycle is reduced.

Reduces Data Redundancy and Error:

With the integration, all information, just like the web customer details, web orders, payment & shipping information will be integrated into ERP software. Additionally, the Item and Inventory details are often uploaded from ERP to the e-commerce portal, eliminating the necessity of re-entering the info. Thus the mixing reduces human involvement, data redundancy, and error happening across the two different platforms.

Increase Customer Satisfaction:

One can quickly raise the extent of customer satisfaction by providing the up so far and real-time product information, inventory availability detail, order tracking feature, etc. within the E-commerce from ERP software. One also can automatically notify about when the shipment goes out, and thereby track the delivery along its journey. Real-time information providence adds value to the customer experience. Albeit trouble comes by, e.g., a delay or lack of stock, knowledge about things can minimize any dissatisfaction.

Better Control of your Business:

The integration of eCommerce and ERP business processes allows business owners to manage the entire business process from one location. It also unifies the eCommerce system with inventory, manufacturing, CRM, financials, e.tc. It is improving the communication between the interior departments. Finally, if you create money online and offline, integration allows you to possess one holistic picture of your sales.

If you are looking to develop an eCommerce app and looking for a cost-effective solution, then Cart Wiz is the best solution for you. It is an easy, affordable, and scalable eCommerce solution for your business.

Blogging might seem like something that people do as a hobby or some kind of a get-rich-quickly idea. However, that’s not the case, as you might think. In fact, blogging is a very important online resource for the success of every eCommerce business.

Blogging & Ecommerce

Understandably, you might question how are blogging and eCommerce related? While blogging is all about writing articles and posting them online, eCommerce is about posting excellent images of a product with attractive descriptions and reasonable prices.

Therefore, let’s look at some facts and figures that I’ve found from various reliable online resources.

· Over 86 percent of content marketers aver that blog posts an integral part of their digital marketing strategy.

· Global surveys reveal eCommerce companies that publish at least 16 posts per month get 3.5 times higher and qualitatively better traffic than others that post just once or twice weekly.

· Consumer surveys reveal blogs are read by 60 percent buyers before making a final decision. Hence, blogs can swing a customer’s opinion in your favour.

· Over 60 percent of content marketers say blog content drives generic traffic to their websites.

· Blogs provide at least one more channel for your eCommerce business.

Given these facts, it’s clear that no eCommerce business that’s serious about staying in the market can afford to ignore blogging; therefore you can start blogging and make your small eCommerce business grow rapidly.

 Importance of Blogging for Ecommerce

Now that we’ve seen five key elements about the importance of blogging for eCommerce businesses, let’s discuss some of these and others in detail.

Blogging Helps Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to promote any business and get customers. Generally, most affiliate marketers are bloggers. They write superb, honest reviews about your brand, products, and services in a manner that people love to read. And they also provide affiliate links from where these visitors to their blog can buy your products and services.

When you provide an affiliate marketing program, there’ll be hundreds or even thousands of bloggers that would sign-up to promote your eCommerce business. They’ll write blogs that speak superbly about your company, brand, and it’s offerings. And blogs generally influence a buyer to place the order immediately. Obviously, you’ll have to part with some affiliate commissions. But considering that blogging is offering thousands of sales channels for your eCommerce business, the expense is definitely worth every penny.

Saves Advertising Costs

Regardless whether you open own blog on the business website or a separate one, pay bloggers to write or post your content, blogging helps you save a mini fortune that would otherwise be spent on conventional offline marketing and advertising in print and electronic media, hoardings and other such channels.

Promoting a blog costs far lesser than conventional advertising in many ways. As an eCommerce business, you can hire a content writer and a digital marketer to promote your brand and its wares online. And this helps your blog to reach millions of people worldwide. This wouldn’t be possible through conventional advertising since it is limited by space and cost.

Build Email List

Building an email list is very important for every eCommerce business. It helps you to stay in touch with customers, send updates about your products and services, new launches and innovations, price drops and promotions, and lots more. However, nobody is going to part with their email unless there’s some benefit for them. And if you have a superb blog, people will definitely provide you their email and sometimes, contact numbers too.

A lot of businesses mistakenly believe that email marketing is thing of the past, archaic, or even redundant in today’s era of instant messengers. However, that’s not the case. People definitely read an email if it’s about something they would love to hear or know. On the other hand, people are more likely to ignore or discard an instant message such as SMS or WhatsApp message thinking it’s a spam.

You can also send a link for customers to place orders through your emails. Hence, blogs make it possible for eCommerce businesses to build that all-important email list.

Receiving Consumer Feedback

Consumer feedback plays a vital role in the success of any eCommerce business. Positive feedback serves as subtle or inert advertisements while negative feedback indicates there’re opportunities to improve or innovate your brand offerings. And blogs make it possible for you to invite such feedback from consumers.

One thing you can also expect: some of your competitors will also post negative comments on your blog. If you know to blog, it would be easy to detect what kinds of comments your rivals are posting to deride your business. Such comments will usually attack stronger points of your business. And feedback from rivals impersonating as customers is an indication that you’re on the right track.

Blogging Educates Customers

A separate or independent blog about your brand and its offerings also helps educate customers. I’ve seen this superb example where a brand of mattresses from a large FMCG company in India also has a blog about sleep and its importance. In fact, the blog is all about the importance of sleep and good health. However, it subtly promotes that brand of mattresses too. And I can say without hesitation that their blog is working wonders for the brand. Because it educates people about a common and vital feature of our life- sleep.

Similarly, you can also start a blog that educates people about the need for your product and how it can help them lead better lives. Use real-life stories from satisfied consumers. Generally, people identify themselves with real-life people and wish to replicate their experiences for their own benefits. When you educate people through blogs, you’ll be attracting an informed customer. And such informed customers usually spread a message about your brand through the priceless word of the mouth publicity

In Conclusion

The above five reasons and more aptly prove that blogging is important for your eCommerce business. Blogging isn’t easy but nor is it difficult. By investing a little on blogging and digital marketing, your eCommerce business can easily carve a niche in the market.

Razorpay is one the fastest growing payment gateway platforms and is easily integrated into Flutter. It allows users to simply accept, process and disburse payments with ease. Specific flutter plugin makes it easy to use within all flutter applications. This acts as a wrapper around the native Android and iOS SDKs.

Razorpay is mainly used in India and the majority of its clients include small businesses having 1M-10M dollars revenue. It has a market share of 1.79%. Few companies currently using it are Spicejet, BookMyShow, Nykaa, Urbanclap, Zoho, Zomato, Goibibo and many more.  Razorpay provides products for every payment need. Be it the payment button, payment links, cash-out, subscriptions, auto-pay UPI, it has a solution for all. It comes with easy activation and economic pricin

Recently, we integrated Razorpay for one of our clients – CabbyLal – A Taxi Booking App. Using Razorpay made the process of payment integration in flutter application development simple, quick and easily testable.

 Here is the step by step guide for integrating Razorpay in flutter:

Setting up and generating the API key

· Create a Razorpay account and log in to the dashboard.

· Select the mode (Test – for testing purpose or Live – for production environments) for which you want to generate the API key.

· Navigate to Settings → API Keys → Generate Key to get the key for the chosen mode.

  Installation and importing package

· Install Flutter Razorpay package

· Add the below code to dependencies in your app’s

pubspec.yamlrazorpay_flutter: 1.1.0

· Run – flutter packages get within the root directory of your app.

· Import package by adding the below code

import 'package:razorpay_flutter/razorpay_flutter.dart';

  Creating an instance and handling events

· Use the below code to make a Razorpay instance.

_razorpay = Razorpay();

  Events and handlers

· The Razorpay flutter plugin uses event-based communication and emits events when payments fail or succeed. The event names are exposed via the constants from the Razorpay class

 EVENT_PAYMENT_SUCCESS

The  payment was successful

EVENT_PAYMENT_ERROR

The  payment was not successful

EVENT_EXTERNAL_WALLET

The  external wallet was selected for payment

Use the on(String event, Function handler) method on the Razorpay instance to connect event listeners.

void initState() {

   super.initState();

   _razorpay = Razorpay();

   _razorpay.on(Razorpay.EVENT_PAYMENT_SUCCESS, _handlePaymentSuccess);

   _razorpay.on(Razorpay.EVENT_PAYMENT_ERROR, _handlePaymentError);

   _razorpay.on(Razorpay.EVENT_EXTERNAL_WALLET, _handleExternalWallet);

}

· Define the handlers in the class to handle different responses

 Future<void> _handlePaymentSuccess(PaymentSuccessResponse response) async {

   UiUtils.showToast("SUCCESS: ", false);

   String paymentId = response.paymentId;

   PaymentViewModel paymentViewModel = Provider.of(context, listen: false);

     PaymentModel paymentModel = await paymentViewModel.confirmPayment(

       bookingId, paymentMode, paymentId);

     if (paymentModel != null) {

     if (paymentModel.success == 1) {

       UiUtils.showToast(paymentModel.message, false);

       Navigator.pushNamedAndRemoveUntil(

           context, "/bookingvisit", (route) => false);

     } else {

       UiUtils.showToast(paymentModel.message, true);

     }

   }

 }

   void _handlePaymentError(PaymentFailureResponse response) {

   Fluttertoast.showToast(

       msg: "ERROR: " + response.code.toString() + " - " + response.message,

       timeInSecForIos: 4);

   print(response.toString());

 }

   void _handleExternalWallet(ExternalWalletResponse response) {

   Fluttertoast.showToast(

       msg: "EXTERNAL_WALLET: " + response.walletName, timeInSecForIos: 4);

   print(response.toString());

 }

· To clear event listeners, use the clear method on the Razorpay instance.

_razorpay.clear(); // Removes all listeners

  Checkout option settings

· Fill the details along with key as shown in the below code:

void openCheckout(double totalAmount) async {

   var options = {

     'key': UiUtils.paymentKey,

     'amount': totalAmount * 100,

     'name': _name,

     'description': _description,

     'prefill': {'contact': ‘9999999999’, 'email':’[email protected]’},

     'external': {

       'wallets': ['paytm']

     }

   };

     try {

     _razorpay.open(options);

   } catch (e) {

     debugPrint(e);

   }

 }

Payment Success Response:

· Payment Id: Data Type – string: The ID for the payment.

· Order Id:  Data Type – string: order ID if the payment was for an order, otherwise null.

· Signature: Data Type – string: The signature to be used for payment verification. Only valid for orders, otherwise null.

Payment Failure Response:

· Code: integer the error code.

· Message: string the error message.

 External Wallet Response:

· Wallet Name: Data type – string: The name of the external wallet selected.

This is the era of e-commerce. There’s no point denying that. Yet, if, by any chance, you’re still missing this point, you’re probably living under a rock.

E-commerce website and app development has been ahead in the race of web trends. There’s an enormous market out there to provide e-commerce solutions to help their customers succeed in their business goals. As users, we are flooded with numerous options; it’s a difficult challenge for the sellers to immerse their customers with meaningful experiences so that they ought not to drop off the midway.

But if your eCommerce website or application is not built to offer an exceptional user experience, get ready to face either average or below average ratings. The reason for such experience can range from pixelated images to inadequate product information.

With the recent surge towards mobile browsing, one has to make sure that their e-commerce website must run well on mobile browsers, even if they have a dedicated mobile app. A recent example being Flipkart.

Let’s explore some of the most common e-commerce app and website design mistakes that you must avoid to grow.

Inadequate product information

With the limited screen space on mobile phones, businesses often reduce the size of the product description.

Product pages in an e-commerce app must be as relevant and comprehensive as in the other channels like a full desktop website. You’d not want a potential customer to read different information about your products on different channels.

To make sure that the production information is consistent in all of your sales channels, make sure that you the content properly. This means that you should put the most relevant information about the product in the top most sections of the details page and leave the less relevant information either hidden (i.e. click to expand) or below the top fold.

The catch here is to identifying the most relevant information about any product. For this, we suggest you put yourself into your customer’s shoes and see it from their point of view.

Long & tedious Checkout Process

The checkout process plays an important role in the success of any e-commerce store. Many studies have shown that a lengthy and tedious checkout process results in a steep drop in sales.

For this reason, Amazon patented their One Click Checkout Process. And it’s worth billions. It proved to be game changer for Amazon.

It’s by design of the human nature that we want to get things done quickly and this nature is augmented further by the attention grabbing apps in our phones.

The rule is simple- your e-commerce website and app must be able to do quick checkouts. And for this to happen, you need to make sure that your website stores information like address, payment options etc for each customer and use the same information without asking the customer to refill them again and again.

Of course, they can edit it but studies have shown that most people do not really change such information much. So it’s safe to store them and re-use.

Too Many Features

As the saying goes, more features is equals to more bugs. Even with bug free implementation of features, the users get tired of using them after some time.

For example, an e-commerce app and website does not require a Story like feature of Snapchat, unless you are implementing social features in the app. nobody is stopping you from building any number of features you want, but you must realize that the sales are the utmost important thing in your store.

Instead of building unwanted features, focus on growing the revenue and sales of your store instead. And as many studies have implied, a buyer doesn’t really want every feature in the app or website. They want a pleasant and stable experience from your store.

Lack of Payment Options

This is easily the most common issue yet the most easily fixable one. With the plethora of options to choose from, it’s rather easy to pick a payment gateway for your e-commerce store.

Choosing the correct payment gateway is a task when you are doing sales internationally. For example, Google Pay for India or UPI is limited to Indian customers and not international ones. In such cases, you need to make sure that your payment gateway accepts international credit cards too.

Adding the checkout option like Cash on delivery, especially in India, also increases the chances of sale in some cases.

Lack of personalization

Given the competition in e-commerce space, we believe that personalization is the key to success. Why? Simply because a customer wants to feel at home when they visit your store. They want to know what they should buy next. Or if there’s a sale on something they saw earlier on your store.

Simple things like sending follow up email on an abandoned cart, or sending anniversary greetings with special discounts can go a long way than you can imagine. Such personalization tactics also brings customer loyalty.

Talking about loyalty, it’s something that most stores do no appreciate but can bring massive returns if done correctly. We suggest starting small by giving loyalty points to your customers on each purchase and then building campaigns upon those points.

Not using Analytical tools

If you’re not using any analytical tools such as Google Analytics to understand and measure various matrices on your store, you won’t be able to plan correctly.

Not employing data analytics is one of the most common mistakes that e-commerce store owners do. Most of the modern analytics tools like Google Analytics; Mix panel etc are very easy to integrate.

These tools help you understand your target audience and your customers better. Once you’ve gathered enough data about what’s going on on your store, it’s becomes easy to make informed decisions.

Conclusion

E-commerce is here to stay thanks to the rapid and cheaper adoption of the Internet. If you run a brick-and-mortar store, you should, without any delay, get an e-commerce app and website for your store.

We’re here to help you design, develop and scale your e-commerce store using both e-commerce mobile app and e-commerce website. Reach out to us to understand more about our offerings.

Flutter is witnessing a meteoric rise. With the introduction of Flutter 2.0 along with full web support, it feels like magic that you can generate a web-app and a mobile app from a single code base. Just. Amazing.

But with the rise of Flutter and its ecosystem, comes the troubles of doing one thing in a myriad of ways. One such trouble is the number of packages available to manage state in your Flutter application.

With more demanding users, even the most simple use-case are becoming complex to implement in a mobile app. Need to update the number of items in the cart globally after adding a product in it? You need a state management solution. Need to maintain the login state of the user throughout the app? You need a state management solution.

The funny part is, previously we tend to ignore global variables, but now, we are embracing them in the form of global states. How times have changed. It’s not too long that we’ll start using “goto” statements in the code as well. (Just kidding. No one should ever use “goto”.)

The Current State of State Management Techniques

State management is an important part of a mobile app architecture. Choosing the right technique helps in building an app which is extensible and testable. If you’re not using a state management solution in your app, then you should look into it more seriously.

In the context of Flutter, there’s a whole ecosystem of state management packages. The developer community is a bit divided at the moment and has not yet decided the best technique because there’s no silver bullet.

A good developer is one who can choose her tools based on the problem at hand. As the saying goes, if you’ve only ever learned to use a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. Hence, one should always understand the pros and cons of multiple tools before making any decision.

Here’s a brief introduction of most used state management packages and techniques

BLoC– It stands for Business Logic Components. According to BLoC, everything in the app must be represented as a stream of events. From button clicks to changes in text fields. Events from one widget enter the stream and other widgets respond. The BLoC sits in between and controls the flow. For large applications, BLoC can be used to create proper separation of concerns. BLoC, however, can be also be daunting to look at. One has to write a lot of boilerplate code to implement it correctly. Read more about the BLoC package here.

Provider– When used along with ChangeNotifier, Provider is a very simple yet scalable technique to implement MVVM architecture in a Flutter app. Provider is essentially a dependency injection package which supports notifying child widgets using the ChangeNotifier. We’ll learn more about it later in the article. It’s also one of Google’s recommended techniques. It uses InheritedWidgets under the hood.

 setState– This comes in-built with Flutter’s Stateful Widget. It’s something that beginners and small apps should use in order to keep things simple and understandable. Unless your Flutter app has more than a few screens (more than 4) and needs to manage a global state, you should use set State(). Read more about it here.

MobX– It’s a popular technique since a long time and uses Observables, Actions and Reactions to notify the widgets of changes. It as initially designed to be used with JavaScript projects and then migrated to Dart to be used used with Flutter projects. It’s an annotation based package which generates the code using a separate package. Read more about it here.

 There are more packages like GetIt, GetX etc, you can read more about them here.

 The advantages of using Provider

There are many advantages of the Provider package specially when combined with ChangeNotifiers-

·  It’s very easy to understand and reason about. The documentation is clear and concise and provides guidelines to best practices as well.

· You can use both reactive and non-reactive ChangeNotifiers in a Widget which means that you can depend on other ChangeNotifiers without being notified about changes. This provides many performance benefits.

· You can use Provider as a simple dependency injection container as well. The only thing is, you need to have access to the Build Context attached the widget tree.

 The MVVM Architecture

The MVVM architecture is rather simple to understand and is highly applicable to reactive frameworks like Flutter.

MVVM Data Flow

As you can see above, the View Model is responsible for holding the business logic and updating the view as the data changes. In a simple app, the model can be used to fetch data from data sources like SQLite Database or a REST API. In larger apps, however, we should use a service layer which will communicate with the data providers, populate the models and then return them to View Models. In this way, the View Model uses services and updates the views.

 The question now is- how can a View Model update a View? The answer is simple- ChangeNotifier.

ChangeNotifier is a class which notifies the listeners which are attached to it when notifyListeners() is called. When coupled with Provider, it can injected into any view and hence making the view reactive to changes.

Here are the basic things to keep in mind when working with the MVVM architecture in Flutter using Provider and ChangeNotifier-

· Every View should have its own View Model.

· Use service classes to get data from external or internal data sources.

· The View cannot directly use any service class. It’ll always use it’s own View Model to communicate with services, even if the communication is non-reactive in nature.

· Inject the View Models (which extends ChangeNotifier) as up as possible in the Widget tree. More specifically, inject them in the root widget tree. This will help in maintaining global state throughout the application easily.

· Do not overuse reactive data because ChangeNotifier takes O(N) time to propagate changes where N is the number of listeners attached to it.

· Do not call notifyListeners() unnecessarily. It causes whole Widget tree to rebuild every time its called (unless listen is false in Provider.of)

 Conclusion

This concludes the Part 1 of this series about Flutter and Provider. In the next part, we’ll look at the boilerplate code that we use in building Flutter apps.

The Covid-19 pandemic is still here and as intimidating as it can get. With the fear of this virus everywhere, most people across the globe have been instructed to work from home. Are you working from your home without a proper office set up? Then you must be surely missing the ideal ergonomic work situations areas you are used to in an office environment!

Did you know one of the most crucial health threats is working on laptops in bed, on the couch, kitchen counters and anywhere one shouldn’t?

Work from home may sound interesting but doing it wrong can take a toll on the body and mind. No wonder most people feel stiff and sore by the end of the day.

Let's see some stats

According to a survey, it was revealed that workers decreased overall physical activity, mental well-being and exercise. Many workers struggled with creating a healthy and efficient work environment at home. It has also come to light that one-third of surveyed workers created a dedicated room for their work at home. However, 47.6 percent of workers shared their workspace with others.

Three other studies were also conducted on the physical health of workers at home. The results revealed a range of terms associated with musculoskeletal health.

A study was conducted by researchers at the University of South California for understanding the impact of social, behavioral and physical factors on office worker’s well being during the early COVID-19 work from home phase (April and June 2020). About 1,000 respondents participated in this survey. Around 988 were picked as valid. The results revealed that workers across the board recounted at least one-and-a-half hours extra work time during work from home, decreased job satisfaction and increase in neck pain. Around 64 percent of the respondents developed one or more new physical health issues.

 A poll was conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The report revealed 53% of American adults having negative mental health owing to stress linked to the pandemic. The Centre for Mental Health in the UK predicts at least half a million people to suffer from poor mental health.

How to stay fit while working from home?

 Get a Desktop Computer

Try switching between your laptop and desktop computer. Exclusive use of a laptop can be detrimental for health. It is better to get a bigger monitor. It will help you manage your posture and have less effect on eyes. Having a bigger monitor will allow you to look straight ahead while working. Use a laptop as a second monitor instead.

This is coming from our own personal experience. Few of our team members switched to desktop computer for a while and they found significant positive changes in their posture and hence overall physical health.

Tip- Adjust your monitor so that it is directly in front of you at arm’s distance (or a bit more) and your head is about 3 inches below the top of the monitor.

Convert your laptop to make it work like a desktop

Invest in a laptop riser. It is easily available on the market at an affordable price. It helps set your monitor to your eye level. If you do not wish to buy a riser, create it by using blocks of books. This arrangement will help you in bringing your laptop's screen to your eye-levels.

Next, get an external keyboard and mouse. Make sure you adjust the height of the desk and keyboard tray to maintain keyboard and mouse level little below elbow height. Relax your shoulders and keep wrists straight whenever you operate the keyboard and mouse. The right way is to keep arms at your sides and elbows at 90 degrees. This will help your fingers reach the keyboard without affecting your posture.

Invest in a good chair

Do you have a work friendly chair at home? Sitting on bed with a laptop can be detrimental to health. Buy a chair that allows adjustment of height. Maintain the seating arrangement in a way that your feet are on the floor while working. If not, get a footrest. Adjust the back of your chair in a way to ensure ample lumbar support.

Always maintain a gap of around 2-4 fingers between the edge of your seat and the back of knees. The height of the chair should be adjusted in a way to allow elbows remain at the same height as the desk. You can place pillows on chair seats for this purpose.

Maintain a good posture

Maintain a healthy posture while sitting at the desk. Recline by about 10-15 degrees. Do not keep your back at 90 degrees. You should maintain a slight recline to take the pressure off your hip flexors.

Most people feel stiff after getting up after spending hours on a chair. The hips get tight from sitting constantly at 90 degrees. Make sure you do stretches at regular intervals. This is important to avoid stiffness of muscles.

Move every 2 hours

Sitting for longer hours can lead to several health complications. So make sure you get up and take a walk every 2 hours. Do some stretches too. In case, you feel that a specific part of your body is disturbing you, focus on that specific area.

It is also advisable to change your posture at least twice in an hour. You should also carry out some of the tasks standing. Download an app and set reminders on your phone so that you get up and walk every two hours. Remind yourself to take steps towards a leaner healthier you.

Install Desk at Right Height

The table you use to work on laptop or computer should not be very high. Keep your chair raised in a way that your elbows are the same height as the table. Place something under the feet in case, if they are dangling. The feet should lie at 90 degrees.

Get a Footrest

Invest in a footrest. Many people tend to perch at the edge of their chair. This is because the table is too high. A footrest will push you back in your chair. This provides ample support to your back too. It is available widely at various online shops. Buy one that suits your specific requirements.

On a healthier note

Work from home is not a bad idea especially if you plan it well. The arrangement should not affect your health. Following the above listed ergonomic tips will help you keep your health in good shape while working from home.

Eat healthy, stretch and walk every two hours. This will keep your heart, mind and body in good shape. After all, you gotta live with them and in them.

With the growing needs of customers, every business wants to go digital. One of our clients, who are into the distribution business of FMCG products, also wanted to digitize their organization. They were looking for a fully customized mobile CRM and a web-based dashboard.

We created an end-to-end mobile solution for them. Its one app for placing orders, managing bills, making payments, ledgers, and products for both customers and their salespersons.

It is accompanied by a custom dashboard that includes employee management tools as well. This dashboard allows them to do every operation that is present in the mobile app and much more.

The app was well-received by their customers and their team. Now, they get more time to scale their operations. They get more time and energy to understand leaks in their sales pipeline.

Overall, we are extremely proud to say that we helped them transform digitally. Read on to learn how we helped them achieve this feat.

Technology is disrupting the economy by making it shareable and accessible for everyone. With services like Ola and Uber, it's extremely easy for anyone to book a cab for any kind of commute.

One of our clients is into the cab business and was looking for a solution to grow it further using technology.

We decided to help them and build them a mobile app for their business. With our Taxi Booking Application, along with the mobile applications, we provided a complete system for their operations including fleet management, staff management, accounting, and finances. We automated the whole booking operations with sophisticated algorithms.

Who doesn't like listening to music, have you tried African Music yet ?

Do you know Sange Music is one of the best music streaming applications available on all platforms with 20,000+ African tracks and 2000+ users in just 2 months of their launch.

Create your own playlists, download songs and listen to your favorite tracks anytime. You can also upload your own tracks and share it with others.

Here is a short case study on our journey of developing and making Sange Music a success.

Since the inception of the Internet, or more specifically, the World-Wide-Web (WWW), back in the 1980s, we’ve seen tremendous growth in content and it’s accessibility. More importantly, the tools to manage that content have seen decades of development from thousands of developers.

As soon as businesses realized that the content on the Internet can be utilized to market products and services, they started developing content management systems for internal usage. Some of them became amazing open-source projects like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress etc.

With the advancement of mobile technology and connected devices, posting content only on websites was not enough. Businesses soon realized that they need better content management tools and better technologies to distribute them on multiple platforms.

Thanks to the development of REST APIs and GraphQL over the years, it has become very easy to expose content securely with multiple kinds of clients like Flutter based Android and iOS mobile apps, websites, web-apps, Kiosk terminals etc.

Headless content management is a strategy to allow the clients to consume content irrespective of their server-side implementation. To give you an example, most server-side technologies like PHP, NodeJS and Java, put the content in the rendered HTML page, i.e. they insert the data in the HTML page using some templating language. This causes tight coupling between server side and client side logic.

In the case of an API based CMS, the server is responsible for sending the response in JSON/XML format using standard REST or GraphQL conventions and the client is responsible for consuming and rendering the content.

Why do you need a Headless Content Management System?

Scaling content distribution is hard. With so many social media networks and multiple channels of consumption, making sure that the content reaches the right audience at the right time is of utmost importance.

With traditional Content Management Systems, you are limited to only a few channels, most prominent of which is a website. Of course, you can make the website responsive to make it mobile friendly, but what if you need a native mobile app with additional features like Push Notifications, Camera access etc? You simply can’t integrate mobile apps with a traditional CMS.

Further, traditional CMS are not very well extensible because their data modelling is mostly static. There are ways to overcome this limitation but not without a lot of custom development. And of course, with custom development, comes the need to maintain the system as a whole and make sure that it’s secure from new vulnerabilities.

With a headless CMS, you can extend the data model very quickly and add more types of content to it. These CMS expose data in fixed JSON/XML format then leave it to the client to render it. Which means that the clients are free to do whatever they want with the data?

You can also attach multiple data sources at the client side to fetch data from other systems. Ultimately, it’s the client who is responsible for rendering the content which gives immense power to the developers.

Traditional vs. Headless CMS

Now that you know what Headless CMS are and why you need them, it’s time to understand the difference between traditional and headless CMS.

o Hosted on a cloud - Gone are the days of hosting an on-premise CMS and maintaining it with a team of dedicated IT engineers and system admins. With the advancement of cloud technology, almost every headless CMS can be hosted on any cloud provider like AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. This makes sure that the data is always available.

o Limitless device support - With a Headless CMS you’re not limited to just one or two channels or devices. You can access the data or content on any kind of device which can integrate a REST / GraphQL API.

o An Agile workflow - Unlike traditional CMS where the development model is mostly waterfall, headless CMS brings more agility in every project. You can move fast and bring amazing content to your audience in very less time.

o Continuous updates - Headless CMS are designed to be continuously updatable, while traditional CMS must be updated with a certain down-time during scheduled updates.

o Embarrassing microservices architecture - Modern headless CMS are built on the infinitely scalable microservices architecture. This means that irrespective of the number of audience you may get, your CMS system is going to cater to them without breaking a sweat!

o Best for POCs and MVPs - With a traditional CMS, you need to set up the whole project, design the data model and expose data manually. While in case of a headless CMS, you can quickly drag-and-drop the fields, create relationships and voila, you’ve a ready-made API which can be consumed by any type of client connected to the Internet.

As you can see, traditional CMS are only useful if you have only 1 or 2 content distribution channels. If you really want to scale your content marketing efforts to the next level, you should be using a headless CMS.

Conclusion

As the adaptation of the Internet increases in the world, we’re going to witness an explosive demand in content creation and distribution. While it’s easy to create content with a traditional CMS, it’s rather difficult to distribute it properly. With a headless CMS, you can be sure that your content will reach every one of your audience irrespective of the channel or device they use to consume it. Strapi is one of the best headless CMS which offers many customization options. Check out more information about Strapi here.

Want to build a quick MVP for your next big idea? Reach out to us now.

Flutter ever since its inception has been the talk of the town for all the good reasons. In its journey so far, Flutter was quick to create a huge fan base for itself in a brief period of time. Such has been the power of Flutter that has impressed both the budding startups and the huge conglomerates alike, making a lot of them migrate to Flutter.

With a lot of craze around the application development in the market, as the people are turning tech-savvy, enterprises are leaving no stone unturned to get the nerve of their target audience. They ensure that their applications are not only omnipresent on all the platforms but they also offer a lot in terms of user experience and functionality.

Flutter, which is although fairly new to the market has proven its mettle all along, ensuring that the enterprises are able to develop beautiful mobile apps for both the Android and iOS platforms using a single code.

Let us have a look at the points that make Flutter a revolution in the mobile application development landscape.

Provides a wider reach

Provides a wider reach

Using Flutter you can develop apps that target both the Android and iOS platforms, which means you have a wider reach for your target audience. This increases the chances of getting good business.

What is even more interesting is the fact that the consistency on both the platforms remain is maintained, making the app even more desirable for the users. Now that Flutter has already proven itself in the iOS and Android spaces, it has now ventured into the web application area with the launch of Flutter 2.0.

With the emergence in the web application, Flutter has surely left no stone unturned to woo the enterprises, who are looking forward to this rapidly growing app development platform.

It is not wrong to say that Flutter has gained enough traction in the industry to call it the future of app development.

Cost Effective

Another major factor that makes Flutter popular, is its cost-effectiveness. Literally, Flutter costs nothing, as it is an open source platform, where you can use it for free. This clearly helps the enterprises in their cost management, because they save a lot on the license fees by using Flutter.

On the other hand, since you have to write only one code that works for both the Android and iOS platforms, you even save a lot on the resources both during the development and in terms of maintenance.

Thus, app development with Flutter can reduce the cost of your project, making it even more profitable. At the end of the day, it is money which matters!

Used by the industry bigwigs

Flutter is loved by all. Be it the rising startups or the bigwigs like Google, Alibaba, and Broadway, everyone has loved the way Flutter has helped them design beautiful and functional apps seamlessly.

To your amazement, a lot of top apps like Google Greentea, Google Ads, Xianyu, Reflectly, and InKino are built using Flutter. No wonder that Flutter is truly a revolution, that has amazed a lot of tech-savvy end users with such marvelous applications.

High performing and time saving

Flutter makes app development a cakewalk, with its quick app development that enables you to develop some of the highest performing applications. It is the performance of the app that keeps the end users hooked to it, given a short span of human attention, which is just 8 seconds.

At the same time, since you have to develop only one code that suffices both the iOS and Android platforms, you save a lot of time both during development and maintenance phases. This helps you spare with ample time that you can use for other constructive activities like marketing, and collaborations, which could improve your business turnover.

A lot of plugins that offer numerous functionalities

Flutter lets you access a lot of plugins, widgets, and tools that could help you offer many functionalities to the end users of your app by simply integrating them. Moreover, these widgets are open source and you can use them all for free.

This not only saves you from the challenge of coding every time from scratch but also helps you to include multiple features and functions with ease. These additional features can set your app apart from your competitors with better customer engagement.

Thus, Flutter brings you in a win-win situation where you save time and effort while offering the best of the features to your customers.

In a nutshell

On a closing note, Flutter has led to a new revolution in the app development landscape which has stirred with intensity to benefit the businesses in the industry. But leveraging to the optimum benefits is an art, which is yet, not so common in the industry.

At CitrusLeaf, we have been developing some of the finest cross-platform mobile apps using Flutter, since its inception, exploring the new horizons as this platform grows. Are you planning to develop a high performing, cross-platform mobile app that has an amazing UI for your business? Feel free to write to us at [email protected] or contact us and we will be obliged to help you with our reliable Flutter App Development Services.

Flutter ever since its inception has gained a lot of traction due to the amazing features and performance it has delivered, which has impressed the developer community massively. Within a short span of time, Flutter has managed to build a huge fan base. Both startups and fortune 500 companies alike have been migrating in large numbers to this newly released open source cross-platform application development tool.

To witness the much talked about capabilities of Flutter and have a look at its performance, here are the top applications that are built using Flutter:

Xianyu App by Alibaba

Alibaba, which is the world’s biggest online commerce company, has leveraged the capabilities of Flutter to create a beautiful app experience for Android and iOS. Xianyu app, the emerging second-hand online marketplace in China, which has already crossed 50 Million downloads, with over 200 Million registered users is successfully built using Flutter.

Intrigued by the high FPS and smooth UI of Flutter, Alibaba group decided to quickly take the plunge and develop their Xianyu app using Flutter.

Google Greentea

Greentea, which is Google’s internal CRM application, is also built using Flutter. It has everything from the rich visualizations to a great UX that has helped the team manage their sales targets and progress in an efficient way.

Google Ads

The famous advertisement platform of Google provides its users with the ability to run their ad campaigns smoothly on their smartphone. This has not only enabled them with the rich visualizations and functionalities of Google Ads but has also provided the advantage of mobility to its users.

It showcases many functionalities such as the real-time alerts and notifications, lets the users call Google expert, acts on the suggestions to enhance the ongoing campaign, adds, edits or removes keywords, and a lot more. ††

SG Bus Tracker

SG Bus Tracker is a bus tracking app that is built using Flutter. It tracks the local buses arrival in Singapore, using bus timing database directly from Land Transport Authority of Singapore.

It has a customizable and rich UI, where it offers appearances in Light, Dark & Colorful themes, letting the users choose whichever they want. It Lists nearby bus stops that are serviced by SBS, SMRT, Go Ahead, and Tower buses.

SG Bus tracker provides its users the provision to mark the bus stops as favorites for a better and quick access. It shows color coding for the seat availability, with Green for Vacant seats, Yellow for standing available and Red for limited standing space for the bus.

Reflectly

Reflectly is a beautiful journal and mindfulness app built in Flutter, that is driven by Artificial Intelligence.  Its amazing UI impresses the users, making the daily journaling more interesting. It is the personal mental health companion, which helps its users reflect on their daily thoughts and issues.

It allows its users to create stories in their personal journal, where it offers a set of few questions every day to reflect the day. Reflectly also offers advanced statistics to determine the behavior pattern of the user, along with actionable insights.

Hamilton Musical

Hamilton is the official app of Broadway musical built using Flutter that includes a lot of features for its users. This app includes several features such as daily lotteries, exclusive news, videos, trivia game, merchandise store and lots more.

It has a branded native design that is consistent on both the iOS and Android, which makes it even more rich in terms of the user experience it delivers to its end users. With lot many features, and rich visualizations, Hamilton is surely an app which has successfully engaged its users and has been among their favorites.

Top Goals

Top Goals is a fully customizable football app built using Flutter. It offers rich UI and high flexibility, where the users could create their own theme, follow their favorite football teams live.

It lets the football fans create their polls, comment their predictions, get the latest news about the sport, get the live updates of the ongoing games, rankings table, and forum where they can engage with fellow football fans. All this offers a high user engagement, making it a favorite among the football enthusiasts.

Flydirekt

Flydirekt is an app built using Flutter for standby travelers. This app gives live and detailed information about availability forecast, destination, and routes, exact loads of the airlines through its amazing UI.

Abbey Road Studios Topline App

Topline is the first app from the famous Abbey Road Studios. This app which is built in Flutter is meant for musicians to capture their song ideas on the move. It helps the artists to record the songs, where they can share files, sing over the imported tracks, add lyrics and a lot more with just a single app.

Its amazing features and a rich UI makes it a favorite among the artists who like to sing and record on the go.

InKino

InKino is an app made using Flutter, which is dedicated to searching for the movies and showtimes in the Finkino cinemas. This app which uses Dart has 40% code sharing between the Flutter and the web.

InKino happens to be multiplatform Dart app which showcases Redux. While Android and iOS apps are built using a single Flutter code. The web app is made using AngularDart, making it one of its kind applications.

InKino lets its users book and buy tickets by going through the details of the ongoing movies in the Finkino cinemas. Its rich UI and detail-oriented approach make it one of the favorite movie ticket booking apps.

Trinity College Orientation Application

Trinity College Orientation Application is an app built using Flutter that has been created for the Trinity College at the University of Toronto, to accompany the first year students during their orientation week. The best part of this app is an engaging and rich UI that has powerful animations and card transitions.

It has a detailed schedule of events, interactive maps, miscellaneous information with a Q&A system that assists the new students in the most engaging and effective manner.

Watermaniac

Watermaniac a lightweight simple yet effective app built using Flutter that aims to track and log the daily intake of water and fluids. It has a beautiful UI and engages its users with constant reminders to drink water, whenever they fall short of the expected water levels.

SpaceX Go!

SpaceX Go! which is an unofficial open-source SpaceX tracker, has been built for the mobile platforms using Flutter. It is an interesting app with a rich UI that allows its users to check both the past and upcoming launches, portfolios of the vehicles, and a roundup of the company.

It is highly simple and subtle but an interesting app dedicated to space and astronomy enthusiasts, which aims to give them regular bytes.

Weight Tracker

Weight Tracker is a simple weight tracking app built in Flutter. It is a lightweight app that is cross-platform compatible in nature. It aims to help people trying to manage their weight do it in an efficient manner.

This app has a rich UI that makes it very user-friendly. It keeps a log of your daily weight and plots graph to show insights into the progress of your weight management journey.

Platypus Crypto

Platypus Crypto is an ad-free cross-platform app that is built in Flutter, which aims at tracking the various cryptocurrencies. It has an intuitive interface that includes real-time graphs for a week, the current prices, market caps and the percentage change over time.

It has various features such as rapid sort, search and refresh, along with several other customization UI features that make it one of the most desirable apps among the cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

On a closing note

With these Top 15 Apps that are built in Flutter, we can clearly infer that Flutter offers a fleet of widgets that can be leveraged to develop beautiful and highly functional apps that are cross-functional, without burning a hole in the pockets.

But the catch is, one has to trust skilled developers that are capable enough to make beautiful apps using this fairly new technology for your business.

CitrusLeaf is one such company that has been working on Flutter since its inception. Having developed some of the most beautiful and highly functional apps for the businesses using Flutter, we are looking forward to helping you build an amazing app for your business.

Feel free to write us at [email protected] or contact us to avail our reliable Flutter App Development Services.