Features Of Future Ready Applications

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
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Nostradamus had a gift that most of us would give an arm and a leg for. He could gaze into the time ahead and accurately predict the events in distant future. His quatrains are legendary for both their predictions, and their vagueness, which allows every sentence to be interpreted in many different ways. While Nostradamus predicted the future, there was another breed of people who defined it. The Galileos, Thomas Alva Edisons, Alexander Graham Bells and Wrights of the world were great minds who designed for the future generations, or we can say they designed the lives of the future generations. While Nostradamus had the gift of a psychic, these inventors had the power of vision of the future.

In today’s world, the future will be defined by technology. Mobility is a key component of our lives that has, and will continue to shape our lives and professions through its significant impact on the same. Since mobility is more about the applications than the devices, it is the apps that will define the future. However, since the future is well… future, how does one know what mobile apps will look like then? The least we can ...
... do is that we create apps today that are designed keeping the future in mind. `In order for the mobile apps of today to be applicable tomorrow, and the day after that, they need to have certain features that will ensure the same.

Modularity – The days of the monolithic chunks of code are way past. Today the applications are written in pieces, and then stitched together. The code for tomorrow will need to be highly modular, with open standards based integrations between the different modules. This will allow for easier updation of individual modules, easier problem isolation, and also easier addition, displacement, and replacement of features. The use of open standards is preferable, because the proprietary technologies are restrictive, and the world is most certainly moving away from them.

Context awareness – the apps of the future will be developed for mobile human beings, not just for mobile devices. They will need to be a lot more intuitive than to just respond to manual input. This can happen only through context awareness. The applications, when executing, has to be aware of the contextual parameters like location, task, priority, and situation to as to provide the optimum ‘relevant’ outcome. Most of the future direction of mobile applications is going to be centered on context awareness.

Self-Learning – In addition to ‘awareness’, the apps of tomorrow will need to have ‘intelligence’. The ability to learn user behavior, choices and other parameters, the product should be able to fine – tune its own future responses to the user. The ability to perform pattern analysis and predict user actions will be the key for the mobile applications to replace personal assistants.

Input Free – The best app is an app that does not require a user’s input at all. It is an app that understands the user well enough to predict his / her behavior. The prediction is not just limited to the behavior. The app should be designed to take into account the context (location, priority etc.) and the user’s usage patterns to accurately predict what information will the user need. All this should happen without any input from the user, or very minimal like starting the app, if at all.

These features and more will define how ht future of human – mobile technology workflow will work tomorrow. All we can do is to create code today that survives the test of tomorrow.

The author is associated with one of the top mobile apps company, mobile application development Dallas and mobile healthcare solutions