As a website publisher, most people like to have as much presence online, as possible. There is no denying that Mobile is a great medium to publish your content and reach bigger audience. One of the best ways to be available on a mobile device is via a dedicated app for your website.

Android is one of the most popular mobile platform, it already has more than 50% market share in USA. Having your app on Android can surely be a big advantage for your website, and with help of free tools that we are going to mention in this post, you can create an Android app for your website in few clicks. You don’t need any coding skills for this, all you need is a website and few minutes.

Without further ado, here are 5 tools to help you create your Android App.

1) AppYet

If you need a pretty basic app, AppYet is the solution. AppYet is a web service that allows you to create, in just a few clicks, reasonably feature-rich and presentable AndroidRSS feed readers for websites of your choice. All you have to do is specify an RSS feed(s) for one or multiple sites of your choice and enter a name for the app. AppYet adds all information to an app template, builds your app and mails it to the email account that you used to register with the service. Alternatively, you can download it to your computer from the My Apps page. There aren’t a lot of customization options, except for the option to upload your own icon and hiding two tabs (Podcast and Source) in the created app’s interface.

AppYet

2) AppsGeyser

AppsGeyser is a free service that not only helps you convert your content into App, but also allow you to make money through it. After you are done creating your app, AppsGeyser will help you get traffic to your app, help you engage your audience and monetize your blog’s app for the best possible returns. It supports features such as HTML5, pop-up notification, Social Sharing, Tabbed Browsing etc.

AppsGeyser

3) Conduit

Conduit Mobile makes it easy for web publishers and content providers to create custom mobile apps on their own, without the need for designers or any coding skills. With the Conduit Mobile platform, you’ll only need to develop your app once, and then publish it to all the leading app stores and marketplaces, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung. Just give your site URL to Conduit and it scans your site for content automatically, choose from a rich selection of built in content types, including RSS feeds, photo and video feeds, social media feeds, static HTML, radio streams, and more! It makes all the developing processor very easy as well.

Conduit

4) Mippin

Mippin takes your RSS Feed and creates one for Android as well as Apple iPhone. Mippin is smart enough to keep your app in sync on both the platforms and uses HTML5 in order to produce an app that fits with almost all platforms. Mippin say that it can create app in 5 minutes, we were able to create basic one for ourselves in less than that.

Mippin

5) Free Blog Apps

With Free Blog Apps you can create your own app for the android marketplace using your blog’s RSS content. It’s simple and automatic. Let your readers stay up-to-date with your blog news from their android phones or tablets. Enter your RSS, customize your app on the next page, afterwards you can download and share your free droid application on Twitter, Facebook or your website. Best of all it’s free and works with popular blog software like Blogger, WordPress, Blogspot, Feedburner and more.

FreeBlogApps

With these tools, you can easily create apps for your website. Do tell us if you know about more such tools, comment box is below. While these tools are great if you need a basic app, for a customized one you will need expert Android Developers. We can help you for your android application development requirement, write to us at info@techaheadcorp.com for FREE 30 minutes no obligation consultation with our android experts($200 Value).

Article was First Published at ToolsJournal

Apple App Store has been leading since the dawn of Smartphone era but the time there is changing. Android Market has already surpassed the Free Apps count in App Store, and analysts from Distimo estimate that it will soon overtake it in terms of total apps too. Android developers are giving hard competition to iOS developers. Most of the stuff in Android market is free, approximately 2/3rd of android apps are free apps.

With that big number of free apps, it is hard to choose the best ones. If you recently bought an Android smartphone, you might be thinking of free apps that you should have on your phone. We are here to help you in choosing the must have apps for Android.

Here is our pick for Top 10 Free Android Apps, in no particular order.

 1. Seesmic

There are many Twitter apps on Android – and Twitter itself shook up the scene with the launch of its own-brand app recently – but we’re sticking with Seesmic. Offering support for multiple accounts, a home page widget showing latest tweets and an incredibly slick and professional design, it’s one of the finest examples of app development out there today.

Seesmic

2. Facebook for Android

Facebook for Android is lacking in features compared to Facebook itself, but a recent update added Inbox support to the Android app, finally allowing its users to communicate in almost real time. The app’s fast and stable, with a simplicity that reminds you of the old days when using Facebook used to be bearable.

Facebook for Android

3. ASTRO File Manager

ASTRO is nothing more than a Windows-style file explorer, but if you’re into tinkering and directly installing Android APK files yourself, it’s essential to stick something like this on your phone. It makes your phone feel like a computer, and makes you feel like you’re in charge of it.  ASTRO launched a Pro version recently but still exists with an ad supported free version.

Astro

4. iJobs

Find jobs from your Android phone with Indeed.com, the most comprehensive search engine for jobs. In a single search, Indeed offers free access to millions of vacancies from thousands of company websites, recruitment agencies and job boards in USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, India, South Africa, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore and Australia.

iJobs

5. Samsung ChatOn

There are plenty of messaging tools on Android, but Samsung’s beats many of them by offering multi-platform support – with clients even available for older Samsung non-smart feature phones. It could be the ideal way to keep in touch with an out of touch relative. More “with it” users will be able to use its drawing, image sharing and social networking features.

ChatOn

6. Google Sky Map

A stunning app that renders Patrick Moore obsolete, by using your phone’s orientation tools to give you an accurate representation of the stars and planets on your screen. Point your phone at the sky, then learn what constellations are visible and if that’s a UFO or just Venus. Google Sky Mapeven works indoors, if you’re not keen on getting cold.

Google SkyMap

7. Layar

The stunning augmented reality app Layar has recently gone commercial, adding an online shop that allows users to buy AR content such as travel guides, local house price apps and much more. But you are still able to use the numerous free Layers to pop data up over real-world locations, delivering a satisfying futuristic experience.

Layar

8. Foursquare

Foursquare helps you explore the world around you. Keep up with friends, get insider tips, and unlock discounts and rewards; with the Google app offering easy one-click check-ins, integrated Google Maps for a seamless Google-branded experience and home page shortcut options to all your favorite places.

FourSquare

9. Google Goggles

Google Goggles lets you take photos and have Google analyse them and come back with a search results page for what it thinks you’re looking at. However, the app’s main use is as a QR code reader, which lets you scan barcodes for quick access to apps and whatever data people choose to embed in the odd little data squares.

Google Goggles

10. BBC News

While the BBC’s Android iPlayer app is a bit on the disappointing side, the corporation’s BBC News app is much more refined. There’s a stylish grid-based front page, plus you are able to swipe from left to right to switch between stories in your chosen specialist category. A recent update also added a couple of Home screen widgets, plus the ability to submit your own news tips!

BBC News

There you had it, our pick for the Top 10 Free Android Apps. Let us know what you think of them in comments below.

Apple’s iPhone has always been famous for its beautiful Apps. Apps that look great visually are always preferred over Apps without the visual appeal and simplicity, even when they have exactly same functionality. Apple and Microsoft has set design guidelines for developers which allows them to create beautiful apps which are consistent with the OS. Apple in particular is known to give much emphasis on design.

Android on the other hand has always been on the receiving side of criticism for not having any design guidelines in place. Android despite having more than 50% market share of smartphones in the recent quarter, failed to impress much developers. Most of the Android Apps looked like, what we can call as ugly. With the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, Google tried to improve on it by giving major emphasis on making Android beautiful and much more user-friendly. But improving Operating System is only one part of equation, they need to have beautiful apps as well. A third- party app that does not follow the same design principles as the OS, sticks out like a sore thumb and spoils the experience for the entire OS and not just the app.

Seems like Google has realized this fact and has come up with Android Design, new style guidelines for Android. Google has launched Android Design as a subset of the Android Developers site. The site features exhaustive list of UI guidelines for developers to follow so that their apps have the same consistent look and feel as the OS. It currently have information like typography, color palettes, and other stylistic advice, as well as a breakdown of the components making up the Android UI, will include more detailed and granular best design practice advice over time.

Having said that, Google has only provided these as suggestions instead of making them mandatory, developers can still create apps without following these guidelines. Though, I seriously hope that Android developers will create and update their apps based on the UI principle from Android, and help in improving the quality of apps in the Android Market.

Do you have any Android application development requirement ? Contact us today.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich(ICS) was released by Google two months ago, but many smartphones are yet to get a stable release of it. We demystified Ice Cream Sandwich with a user’s perspective in our earlier post. In this post, we will try to see what Ice Cream Sandwich offers for an android developer.

Roboto and Design Philosophy

ICS introduces a huge overall shift in Android’s UI and design, considering it’s a jump from Gingerbread. With Honeycomb (a tablet-only OS), Android moved to a very futuristic, almost Tron-like design. This has been toned down with ICS, and Google has introduced Roboto as a new font to replace Droid Sans. From the looks of it, Roboto improves readability dramatically and looks great.

Improved Text Input and Spell Checking

Error correction and word suggestion are improved through a new set of default dictionaries and more accurate heuristics for handling cases such as double-typed characters, skipped letters, and omitted spaces. Developers can now incorporate spell checking and autocorrect support into their applications easily with the new text service API. See the android.service.textservice package for details.

Near-Field Communication and Android Beam

NFC has yet to really take off, but the possibilities with every Android phone integrating NFC could open up a lot of opportunities for developers. ICS adds more near-field communication (NFC) support with a new feature they are calling Android Beam technology. The technology is using NDEF Push. All apps can take advantage of NFC support in the form of Android Market application referrals. Some developers may choose to go far beyond this baseline and incorporate some physical “bump and beam” features for their users to interact with one another. See the android.nfc package for details.

New Camera Capabilities

Developers can take advantage of a variety of new camera features in Android 4.0. ZSL exposure, continuous focus, and image zoom let apps capture better still and video images, including during video capture. Apps can even capture full-resolution snapshots while shooting video. Face detection is a hot new ICS feature which can be accessed via the Camera.Face class.

2D hardware acceleration

All Android-powered devices running Android 4.0 are required to support hardware-accelerated 2D drawing. Developers can take advantage of this to add great UI effects while maintaining optimal performance on high-resolution screens, even on phones.

Calendar API

A shared calendar content provider and framework API make it easier for developers to add calendar services to their apps. The Calendar is now accessible via a legitimate, publicly supported content provider that allows developers to create and modify a user’s calendar events. See android.provider.CalendarContract for details.

These are features we believe that Android Developers will find useful. Did we miss any important feature? Let us know in comments below.

Credits: www.informit.com

Android Market Applications are becoming more famous with every passing day and has 500,000 submitted Apps, the number it reached in October. On an average each publisher has released more than six apps to Android Market.

With these numbers, one can be sure that the competition in Android Apps Development is fierce. The App reviews are at times full of negative feedback’s. People are more likely to report about the things that don’t work as opposed to praise things that work. App developers need to be very cautious while development, as small bugs can lead to many negative reviews.

In this post we will talk about the Top 5 mistakes that every developer should avoid while developing Android Apps.

1) Avoid Sloth
Everyone likes a fast and responsive app. Make sure you follow these Golden rules. “Don’t do work that you don’t need to do” and “Don’t allocate memory if you can avoid it”.

The application shouldn’t make user to wait, the user expect responses pretty fast. You have very few moments to response to user’s action, if not then your app fails right there. To avoid this, you need to process the request of the user in background, in another thread so that the UI thread be active and doesn’t runs into unresponsive mode.

2) Avoid Gluttony

Make sure that your application doesn’t use too many system resources, making it very slow and draining all of user’s mobile battery. The key is to always use the system resources responsibly. So, to avoid being a bad developer, all you want to do is to make sure you are being very respectful of system resources and using them properly and not using them until you absolutely have to.

3) Keep End Users in Mind

Many App Developers think that they should create something that works without thinking how people will use it in real life. Avoid doing this mistake. Finding out what people think is not that hard; you can conduct surveys and interviews, or have beta testers give your app a thorough review.

4) Avoid Force Close

Android users hate forced closures. Make sure that there are no forced closes on your application. Test the application. Test on different versions to make sure nothing causes forced close.

Android App Force Closure

5) Don’t Discriminate

Android OS supports almost all the major hardware architectures. If you target one type of device, you might miss the 2/3rd of the market. Try centralizing resources, like images and strings etc. That will help you maintain the resources for all different devices available on market. It also helps in Globalizing your App.

Android OS Versions

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Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was released by Google a month back. We covered Google Android Top 8 ICS Features in past. In our current post, we are covering details from users perspective. In our next post we will cover features from Android developers perspective.

Ice Cream Sandwich is aimed at both Smartphones and Tablets, unlike the previous versions; Gingerbeard- which was aimed at Smartphones, and Honeycomb-which was aimed at Tablets.

The first thing to change within Android 4.0 was the type face. Google created a new font named Roboto, which was designed from the ground up for high definitions displays. The font is used throughout the operating system and gives Android a much cleaner look.

Android 4.0 is designed to work without buttons. Virtual buttons in the System Bar let users navigate instantly to Back, Home, and Recent Apps. The System Bar and virtual buttons are present across all apps, but can be dimmed by applications for full-screen viewing. Users can access each application’s contextual options in the Action Bar, displayed at the top (and sometimes also at the bottom) of the screen.

Multitasking is a key strength of Android and it’s made even easier and more visual on Android 4.0. Tapping the multi-tasking button on the home screen reveals all the running application on the device. While Android can handle keeping multiple apps chugging along in the background, you can manually discard or close application by swiping the app off the screen to the right.

This same gesture feature has been added to notifications. Rather than clicking on a notification to clear it from the list, just swipe it off the screen and it will disappear.

The lock screens now let you do more without unlocking. From the slide lock screen, you can jump directly to the camera for a picture or pull down the notifications window to check for messages.

When an incoming call arrives, you can now quickly respond by text message, without needing to pick up the call or unlock the device. On the incoming call screen, one simply slide a control to see a list of text responses and then tap to send and end the call. You can add your own responses and manage the list from the Settings app.

Talk to Type has been available for nearly two years and now is able to instantly transcribe your voice as you talk rather than waiting for you to pause or finish your sentence. This new change allows for smoother transcriptions and makes it easier for the user to use Talk to Type for longer messages without having to press the button multiple times.

A variety of new features greatly enhance the accessibility of Android 4.0 for blind or visually impaired users. Most important is a new explore-by-touch mode that lets users navigate without having to see the screen. Touching the screen once triggers audible feedback that identifies the UI component below; a second touch in the same component activates it with a full touch event. The new mode is especially important to support users on new devices that use virtual buttons in the System Bar, rather than dedicated hardware buttons or trackballs.

Credits: Android.com