Q&A of Software Development

Animation software is a great tool to show your creativity and give reel life to the inanimate things. Animated Videos are, no doubt a very effective form of content. Today marketers and businesses want to make animated videos to lure their audience.

(Source-Unsplash)

Below are the top free and open-source animation software that will serve the purpose:

1. Blender

2. Synfig Studio

3. Pencil 2D

4. OpenToonz

5. Maefloresta Tupitube

6. GIMP

7. Krita

Blender is the best free and open-source software to create high-quality animated videos. It has all the features that an animation software should have, and professional animators often use it.

It has all features that an animation software must have: Modeling, Sculpting, animation and rigging, grease pencil, simulation, video-editing, VFX, scripting, interface, rendering, and pipeline. One can make feature-length films with Blender.

Synfig Studio is known for its Vector Tweening feature that allows the frame to frame integration. Its 50 plus layers (geometric, fractal, transformational) make it a favorite tool of cartoonists and comic creators.

Pencil 2D can be used if you require simplistic design, 2D features, and a user-intuitive interface.

Opentoonz has both paid and free version. If you are pro animator looking for powerful functions, then you can buy the paid version of this software. Otherwise, it has many capabilities and functions for free. It has an advanced modeling feature to make 2D animations.

Maefloresta Tupitube has features like rotoscoping to transfer film images from one sequence to the other, slow motion and cut-out animation. A favorite of the school teachers and students this software is surely a resource for animators and digital artists.

GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program is a tool that you may consider if your purpose is to make simple animations and you want to use software with minimal intricacy. Graphic designers, photographer, and illustrators use it frequently.

Krita is used for making Anime and virtual comic books. It provides features like brush stabilizers, Pop-up palette, mirror tools, and wrap-around mode.

Apart from all this, you can also consider Clara.io, Daz Studio, Bryce, and Stykz as these are decent 3D and 2D animators and VFX software.

If you wish to refer to more animation software, then the below link will help https://www.goodfirms.co/animation-software/.

Help Desk software is also called a ticketing system and it's mainly focused on meeting the needs of the end-user. It’s aim is to manage and resolve issues, or incidents, by acting as a bridge between end users and support staff in order to keep operations running as smoothly as possible. So basically a helpdesk software and a ticketing system are one and the same thing.

Accounting is the most significant process in any business. It requires high-level accuracy and efficiency. You cannot have exact figures on your fingertips if the accounting process is not carried out systematically. Moreover, all the financial decisions of the company depend on the accounting reports generated through your accounting system. A manual accounting system can never provide accurate figures due to which the outcome of your financial decisions can result in business failures. 

With the growth of any business, the complexities in financial transactions also increase. It becomes quite difficult to manage accounts manually. Managing accounts manually means consuming a lot of time and inviting a lot of human errors in your accounting reports. Well featured accounting software can help you eliminate the limitations of manual accounting and save you from the monetary disasters in your business. 

The below comparison chart of manual accounting v/s. Accounting software depicts the reasons why using accounting software is better than using manual accounting methods to record financial transactions, auditing, and generating reports. 

Renting Multi-vendor Marketplace business is a quick buck idea, which is rapidly growing at pace. This software allows both the admin as well as the marketplace owners the ability to earn a profit. With the help of a rental software, a vendor can rent their most preferred products or the ones they don’t want to utilize anymore. On the other side, marketplace admin can keep a commission fee for providing services, thereby helping both the parties to earn a profit.

If you are thinking to launch an online rental marketplace, then you can create it with the following two options:

1. Develop a rental marketplace from scratch
2. Start with ready to launch solutions- If you are looking to enter the market at pace then, ready to launch solutions is a reliable option, as you can set up your rental marketplace quickly and cost-effectively.

Some of the popular online rental marketplace solutions are listed below, which allows the users to launch their rental marketplace swiftly:

Yo!Rent

Yo!Rent is a well-established and robust multi vendor eCommerce rental platform that enables its users to run their site off as their server. This software also provides full customization according to their requirements with intriguing rent and sell features. Yo!Rent is a content management system, which allows its users to create a marketplace along with the authority to publish, edit, and delete their content to rent out or sell items. In addition to this, the software also performs with multiple payment gateways and multi-layer security for the distribution of payments to vendors. This feature provides a visual dashboard that manages order and understands business expansion. Yo!Rent software is explicitly designed for a wide range of eCommerce Rental Business platforms right from startups and small webshops to significant and multi store online marketplaces. This tool creates white label solutions through subscription-based web applications.

Pricing:- $1,999 Lifetime License(12 months of technical support)

Arcadier

Arcadier is a SaaS technology-based e-commerce platform that enables its users to build a multi vendor rental marketplace with an exclusive feature. The software comprises of published APIs (like Shopify) and built-in CSS and JavaScript input to allow tweaks into the existing templates. Arcadier is customizable, user-friendly, developer-free, and sets up within minutes. Arcadia even comprises of the off-the-shelf DIY platform, which comes with robust inbuilt features and integrations. It authorizes its users to buy, sell, trade, or rent any goods, space, or services. The software works with a collaborative approach encompassing an ecosystem of partners, including design studios, marketing and SEO agencies, PR firms, payment providers, and many more. Additionally, Arcadia offers a support network for its marketplace owners and administrators.

Pricing:- $34 per month (Free Trial)

Sharetribe

Sharetribe is a SaaS-based platform explicitly crafted for entrepreneurs that desire to build an online rental marketplace. The software enables its users with full customer support and automatic multistore management feature from a single location. Sharetribe even offers excellent email marketing and SEO management features. Startups and entrepreneurs can build and monitor customer accounts as the tool provides outstanding order management functionalities, that will help the customers to keep track of the orders. Sharetribe’s e-commerce software is a simple, user-friendly, and customizable tool that satisfies every requirement of the user.

Pricing:- $79 per month (Free Trial)

#ExlCart

Exlcart is an open-source platform offering an online rental marketplace that provides an option to customize its source code according to its client's requirements. This tool can manage unlimited vendors on a single platform and authorizes them to upload an unlimited number of products to rent out. ExlCart comprises of various in-built themes which can be utilized to represent brands specific to renting services. Additionally, users can even share their products on Facebook, Twitter, and Google plus to increase their traffic. ExlCart enables vendors to utilize multi-level categories to upload products, which helps the customers to find the products easily. In ExlCart, admin and vendors can manage all transaction records. Moreover, if required, they can even utilize them for future references. 

Pricing:- Exact information not available

Consuming business services through virtual technology is a blissful experience and a luxury for e-consumers. The credit goes to the Internet, Cloud computing, and Software automation that has helped business owners render their services online without any hiccups.

Thanks to these technologies’ subscription-based business models that today, companies like Netflix have flourished, allowing us to catch up with our latest shows on our TV from anywhere in the world. Not surprisingly, today are umpteen businesses that make use of various business models to make millions from their small cubicle.

( Image Source: Paykickstart)

But behind the curtains, there are some handful of tools and recurring payment software that make this magic happen. These automated tools deduct fixed amounts from consumer account at regular intervals as per the decided plan. They activate and resume the service or product access without any human intervention. And not just activate the plan but also informs about the updates.

The recurring payment software allows service providers to take complete control over the billing cycles. It helps them generate revenue and get away with all the payment related bottlenecks - means no more piling of invoices or delay in payment. Meanwhile, the consumer avoids late payment fees as well as undisrupted services. 

Few platforms are expensive and charge as per subscription, while others may charge for each transaction done through them.

Things one should consider before picking up recurring billing software for SaaS are:

• The software should be able to set up the payment plans with ease through UI or API
• Over the period when your products, services, customers and pricing scales the software should be able to adjust billing dates, billing deferments, cancellations, future cancellations, partial cancellations, implement freezes, etc.
• It should have the ability to analyze the billing differences between two or more billing dates
• The system should have the option for declining the recycling payment and switch to the manual payment option
• It should be able to estimate the revenue total on a specific date based on the subscription
• Does it accept multiple currencies?
• What chargeback prevention and fraud management system does it have?
• What level of automation does it support?
• Dunning Management- the software should be able to send a notification to consumers on the payment failure due to expired credit cards.
  

Some of the best recurring billing software tools for SaaS business includes,

• Zoho Subscriptions
• Cheddar
• Pabbly subscriptions
• Chargebee
• Chargify
• Paysimple
• ReCurly
• Ordway
• Stripe
• Chargeover
• Zuora
  

To shed more light on recurring billing software for SaaS business, here is the comparison table of the recurring billing tools mentioned above.

Wrap it up: Don’t rely on guesswork while choosing recurring billing software for the SaaS business. Various businesses have set criteria for their billing payment and cross-checking them against the software’s features is the best way to pick the right software for your business. Also, pricing is an important factor as some of them take a percentage of your revenue as their fees. So a thorough analysis is always recommended.

In the current world where social media presence is one of the best ways for a business to stand out to reach a wider audience. It has become a necessity for any brand that wants to become an industry leader to connect with its potential and current customers. Some of the best social media management tools I have used are:

1. Hootsuite – One of the best social media management tool I have ever used. It provides me to manage all the social media profiles from one dashboard saving my lot of time. Moreover, I can manage 3 social media profiles for free.

2. Sendible – It streamlines the process of managing social media accounts from panning and collaboration to engagement and analytics. It provides a 30 days free trial and its plan starts from $29/month or $24/month if billed annually which stands out to be the best for Solopreneurs.

3. Agoraplus – It is a simple tool with which you can easily schedule your content, get reports and engage followers. It provides a 28 days free trial and its plan starts from $99/month or $89/month if billed annually which stands out to be the best for small business.

4. Sprout Social – It enables brands for all points of connection with their social audience. It provides a 30 days free trial and its plan starts from $99/month which stands out to be the best tool for professionals.

Out of thousands of app development platforms available online, I am definitely going to provide you the list of top-rated free and open source app development software solutions as per my understanding. But, before that, you should be clear on what type of app you want to create and for what purpose. Many times, I have witnessed the challenges app developers face like their apps do not get noticed by their audience, problems with developing cross-platform applications, building applications with advanced UI/UX features and so on. Whatever app you are going to create, i.e., a hybrid, native, mobile, web-based and in that too, Ionic, Angular, React Native, Xamarin or other, your focus should always be on creating a self-explanatory application.

So, if you are ready, then here goes the list of the best open source app development software solutions that are always free-to-use:

1. Buildfire.js - It is a powerful and easy-to-use app builder for iOS and Android apps. It is fully customizable and 100% free app maker.

2. Apache Cordova – Cordova allows you to use HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to develop cross-platform apps.

3. PhoneGap – It is best to make outstanding hybrid apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

4. IonicFramework – It is one of the most reliable mobile UI toolkits to develop high-quality cross-platform apps.

5. Framework7 – It is a full-featured framework to create mobile, desktop, and web apps and an indispensable prototyping tool as well.

6. NativeScript –This open source framework is best to build truly native mobile apps using JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue.js, and Angular.js.

7. Flutter – Google’s UI toolkit – Flutter is now available to build more beautiful native apps for mobile, web and desktop. Flutter 1.9 is live now!

8. Jasonette – The new name is ‘Jasonelle’ that utilizes JSON, Javascript languages to build Android/iOS native apps.

Check out the comparison chart given-below to select the best app development software of your choice:

If you want complete detail of these software programs, check it out here – the best free and open source app development software solutions.

Final Words: Just focus on building an agile app with clean architecture. Let it go through a complete A/B testing process, promote it slightly on the web and most importantly, follow the guidelines of the app stores before submitting your app over there. If it would be incompetent, it will be rejected instantly, even before your audience notices it.

I hope this answer will be satisfactory. Good Luck with your app venture!

Looking for some best open-source vector graphics software? If so, here is the list!

• YouiDraw

An open-source vector graphics software, YouiDraw offers a variety of customizable textured brushes to its users. Along with that, this vector drawing tool also provides a set of modern tools such as a pencil for the sketchy or plain line. YouiDraw is one of the best tools for all sizes of enterprises. It works on HTML 5 canvas with Google Drive. Bein a powerful graphic design software, this tool gives you the opportunity to express your creativity and style in the best possible way. Besides, it can be integrated with all web applications.

• Synfig Studio

A 2D animation open-source vector graphics tool, Synfig Studio is known to work with high dynamic range imaging. The tool allows you to design the animation in the front-end and later it can be rendered with the backend. The tool allows users to apply real-time effects to layers or a group of layers. With Synfig Studio, you can create high-quality animations.

Know about the best 2020 graphic design trends.

• Inkscape

For those who are looking for free yet powerful vector graphics software, then Inkscape is the best choice. This tool is for Linux, macOS, and Windows users. It has several add-ons features that allow easy customization and functionality of this tool. With this tool, one can create a wide variety of graphics such as logos, icons, illustrations, diagrams, maps, and web graphics.

These are my top recommended open-source vector graphics software. However, there are more tools that are also used by a wide chunk of designers. Some of them are LibreOffice - Draw, Skencil, Gravit Designer, and Vectr.

If you are looking for best AI software, then make sure you consider following points in mind:

More user-friendly

Open-source software

Available for Windows, Linux, Mac platforms

Free software

Contains libraries in python that makes it handy to develop machine learning and artificial intelligent systems

To learn Python for free, huge resources should be available on the internet