SleepBot; Having A Good Night Of Sleep

There are days when we wake up light, refreshed and eager to enjoy life. Also, there are days when we wake up groggy and tired. Sometimes, not even a cup of our favorite coffee will freshen us up and the first couple of hours of our day are often wasted while we are trying to recover from what supposed to be a good night of sleep. Browse here for more information.

The requirements of modern life put a heavy burden on us and few people have time to engage in a healthy sleep-schedule. Often, we stay up late during the work days, and those that like to party often oversleep on weekends in order to compensate. All that takes a toll on our mind and body and we’re completely unaware that there are few simple tricks that we can use to ease the overload we put on ourselves.

SleepBot is one of those tricks and it’s an Android/iOS app that has been designed by the same people who have struggled with sleep issues.

Jane Zhu was a college student who, together with some friends, created an app for tracking her sleep schedule as some sort of practical joke, because she as a student hardly slept at all during the exam periods. Unexpectedly, other people supported her and she found out that there are people that are interested in her (by the time) pretty basic app. Time passed and the SleepBot developed into a serious, yet free application. Over 1.000.000 people worldwide are using it at the moment and it is estimated that there are 5000+ new downloads every single day!

SleepBot is one of those SmartAlarm applications. It tracks your sleep cycles overnight and then it wakes you up within a 30 minute window of your actual alarm, while you’re in your lightest phase of sleep.

For those of you who don’t know this, our experience of waking up is completely dependent on those sleep phases and cycles. For example, if we wake up during the deep sleep, or REM phase (this is the phase during which dreaming occurs) – we’ll miss a lot of the benefits of our sleep.

To illustrate it, imagine having your computer doing something that really stresses it, like playing Crysis 2. Then imagine pressing the shut down button in windows start menu in order to turn off the computer. It takes longer to shut everything down that way compared to turning your computer off while your hardware isn’t being used by the other software.

The same thing occurs when you sleep. If you try to turn the sleep “off” while you’re dreaming (playing Crysis 2) the process of shutting down (waking up) will take longer.

And that’s what SleepBot is about. It makes sure that you are not in your dream phase, or that you are at least somewhere near the end of it, when the alarm turns on.

This app is very good at doing that and you can only benefit from it. I strongly suggest that you download this nugget of gold, whether you have sleeping problems or not. It will help you foster proper sleep hygiene and for the amount of options it provides, there is no comparable free application of this type.

For something that started like a joke, it evolved to a pretty serious thing.

Now go check it out.

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The app marketplace has never been more crammed, and there will only be much higher competition among apps - as well as opportunity - as more and more people gravitate toward smartphones and tablets, and as wearables too develop their own app ecosystems.For designers then, it's essential to understand how one app gets noticed whilst another might languish in the app store pool. Visit here for additional info.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we take a deep dive into the various app stores' ecosystems to examine the present difficulty in navigating them, next study the best options for ensuring your app gets a decent rank, and detail the essential considerations for an app user which should influence how designers strategically position their apps. Such considerations include app costs, app promotion, and app store optimization - that could affect whether an app stays prominent in the app store.

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Listed below are a few of the main insights from the report detailing what programmers can do to get noticed:

•    App User Insights: It's important to understand how users approach app industry, what elements of apps lure them in, as well as their use cases for these apps. According to Compuware, about 85% of global mobile device owners surveyed stated that they like to use a mobile app, with the main reasons being ease, effectiveness, and all round user-friendliness. People are using apps more, but it's becoming more difficult to displace apps which have already found their way into consumer lives. It's definitely not enough to be the gleaming new app in the store and get a few write-ups in the tech press. That's exactly why app promotion is becoming an important trend.

•     App Costs: The price tag of apps has a outstanding impact on user demand and app store engagement, and taking into account cost is essential to securing strong visibility, sustained popularity, and continued user engagement. The app analytics firm Distimo reviewed the impact of price changes across the top 400 apps globally for iPhone and iPad in December 2012. In the Apple App Outlet, iPhone apps that lowered in cost displayed a 1,665% increase in download volume over the subsequent five days (judged against the preceding five days). iPad apps showed a similar trend at 871% improvement in download volume. Cost free and freemium apps usually draw in the lion's share of app downloads as well as earnings, with in-app buys within free of cost apps constituting 71% of total iPhone App Store revenue for February 2013.

•     App Marketing: It is also important to understand which app groups are garnering the the majority of consumer attention, and also how different worldwide mobile trends can impact your app's exposure in different countries. It's worth investigating the top app groups for Google Play and iOS, as users sometimes go through category sections for apps to download. There are numerous benefits to featuring your app on a worldwide scale, as many markets have idiosyncrasies which make them hard to target - compelling designers to think beyond the bounds of the two main app stores, Google Play and iOS. Maybe one of the quickest techniques for upping international app downloads is location or internationalization, which essentially involves redesigning your app to match into a local sector, with the most apparent step - but far from the only only one - being to translate your app into the local language.