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Landscape Lighting: A Way to make your Home look the Best from the Rest

‘First impression is the last impression.’

The saying manifests an important fact of life. A striking personality makes a lasting impression. As homeowners, we take great measures to add beauty to our homes. But, one aspect that remains highly neglected is the landscape lighting. Without proper lighting, the beauty of the entire landscape can go to waste.

Landscape lighting is a very broad area to explore. It can prove to be a little tricky without an expert’s help. Instead of considering it as a DIY job, it is advisable to hire a professional electrical contractor who knows the job well. But, you can consider a few tips before hiring an expert.

1. Visualize

Consider different looks for your home. There are so many varieties of lighting fixtures available in the market. And each day, a new type of fixture is added to the list. Make clear decisions to avoid confusion in the future. Do not forget your main aim. It can be anything from illuminating an entire pathway to highlighting a particular part of the lawn. So, it is important to visualize what type of look you want for the exterior of your home.

2. Focus on the ‘Must-Haves’

While listing all your lighting objectives, make sure that you have all the basic elements covered. It includes pathway, porch, garden boundary, staircase, water fountains driveway, etc. Consider all the basic elements because they not only accessorize the exterior of your home but also add to its curb appeal.

3. Take care of positioning the Lighting Fixtures

While positioning the lighting fixtures, take care of how they will look at night. Make sure that they do not cast any unwanted shadow. Be extra careful and ensure that the fixtures do not throw unwanted light-rays in any rooms that are supposed to have a soft appeal.

4. Inclusion of Technology

It is frustrating to turn on the lights every night and wake up early in the morning to turn them off. Instead, set the lighting fixtures to a particular time and opt for automatic operation. Nowadays, there are lighting fixtures that come with power-saving features. Ask the electrical contractor to make optimum use of modern technology in order to make the exterior of your home look beautiful with minimum effort.

5. Avoid Nuisance

Landscape lighting can be a major setback if it disturbs the surrounding areas in one way or the other. Light-rays must not create nuisance for your neighbors. It must not throw unwanted attention on the neighboring homes. A practical approach to the problem can be the use of shields or glare-guards.

Landscape lighting is a good idea to add an extra touch to the overall curb appeal of your home. Whether it is highlighting the small elements of your garden or adding an architectural effect to your home, an electrical contractor can work wonders with the help of landscape lighting. If you want your home to look the best, do not forget to incorporate landscape lighting in your ideas.

When it comes to adding beauty to the exterior of your home, landscape lighting can be a great way to achieve the goal. Power Electrical is a licensed electrical contractor of Greater Toronto Area. We will help you with all types of electrical work for custom homes. Trust the expert for upgrading the electrical panel as well as installing and repairing landscape lighting.

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A Guide to Fitness Tracking App UI & UX

Fitness Tracking App UI Design
Well, not all the fitness apps will have the same user journey. Still, there are some screens that are common, while some other screens will be there to serve specific purposes. Following are the most important and common design elements that need to be considered while designing the fitness tracking app:

Home Screen
Most famous fitness apps home screens contain simple charts that showcase the progress through the user’s training and nutrition plans. The fitness app home page design should be in a manner that contains the user’s recent activities and their progress through their fitness goals.

It becomes too risky to make changes on the home screen when the application is already live and has millions of registered users, because even a small change in the content formation can ruin the user experience.

Home screen’s functionality and elements depend on the app’s primary usage. It is tricky to design the home screen, especially when the app has many primary functions.

Onboarding Screens
Almost every fitness tracking app requires user registration and the most common methods are via a Google account or Facebook. Usually, any other ordinary mobile app would require the user’s mobile number, email address, name, gender, age, and demographics. But fitness tracking apps need more than just the user’s biography.

While it is essential for the fitness tracking app to have detailed user data, apps are likely to lose some potential users during this data gathering process. There is a chance that users will abandon the app if the onboarding functionality is presented as static information. The onboarding process should guide the user through each step of the onboarding process. It keeping the user motivated enough to fill in the required information.

There should also be an option for users to skip the onboarding process, and explore the app first. This option mitigates the risk of app abandonment during the onboarding process.

Activity Tracking Screen
Fitness tracking apps use a variety of data to provide the user with valuable insights. Such applications are supposed to have separate screens dedicated to the user’s activity. For example, there should be separate screens focusing on the user’s heart rate and running sessions. Especially, when the charts shown in the app screens have a variety of data types such as duration, distance, pace, calories, heart rate, etc.

Fitness Plans Screens
This is where most of the fitness tracking solution providers make money from. The apps include a variety of plans the user can pick and follow. The service providers use various types of content such as short videos, pictures, gifs to showcase the plans.

While some plans are free, others come with a price tag. The paid ones are more personalized as they include a workout generator. This generator creates a customized workout plan based on the user’s fitness level, desired duration, props choice, and so on.

Animations
Animations are a great help for illustrating exercise steps to the users. The app designers can also make use of gifs to make this more interesting for the end-user. It is observed that animated elements and charts make the app more interactive to the users, which results in the end-user is more likely to use the app often.

Fitness Tracking App UX Design
The fitness tracking app user experience (UX) is what makes the app features comprehendible and easier to use. If the mobile application requires too many actions from the user to get desired information, it ruins the user experience. In a similar fashion, when the button size is not appropriate for finger touch or responsive, it makes it hard for the users to use the application.

One of the biggest challenges occurs when a fitness training app is developed for both iOS and Android platforms. It is to be considered that both the applications shouldn’t look too different. Although there will be some navigation differences, as both the platforms are very different in functionality.

Following are the some of the fitness tracking app UX considerations:

Navigation
The focus should be on making the app easy to navigate. Unnoticeable buttons and cluttered screens are certainly a dead-end for the application. For example, if there are more than three buttons on a tab bar, it becomes too complicated to navigate.

It is preferred to provide input masks to users for filling out forms. The forms can also have a smart auto-fill feature. Some accessibility features can also be configured. For example, the keyboard shall be programmed to automatically be customized to turn into a number pad if the user is supposed to enter numeric information.

Notifications
Push notifications are very helpful to remind users of their fitness goals, and motivate them to keep consistently using their fitness program. While too many notifications may freak the user out resulting in abandoning the app, too little notifications mean the user might forget that the app even exists on their phone. The app creator needs to find a perfect balance here.

One way to optimize the use of push notifications is to empower the user to personalize their notifications. The fitness tracking app can have a notification setting functionality, where the user can turn on and off any type of notifications. Some apps such as Strava, use friends activities reminders to motivate the user. But it doesn’t mean that every user would want to receive such notifications, and this is where a notification personalization feature will be handy.

Data Usage Transparency
While asking the user’s permission, It is important to provide the user with a clear indication of why the data is needed. Data privacy is a big concern in 2020, and the users want their data to be handled with care.

Fitness App Design Update
While it is important to update the app design once a while to make the app look modern and useful in the ever-changing environment, the designs should be according to the user reviews and research. In the past, we’ve seen many app design updates that made it painful for the users to adapt to the changes. One such example is Twitter. It made a small change of changing the star icon (favourite icon) to a heart icon. It was a very bad design change decision for twitter as it ruined the user experience.

Premium Membership and In-App Purchases
It is tricky to promote premium membership to the users that are already enjoying free services because they might abandon the app if they are pushed too much for paid services. For example, a health and nutrition app Lifesum shows food ratings for meals without any paid membership, but they ask users to get a paid subscription to know deep insights about those ratings.

You won’t want to irritate users by constantly notifying them about paid subscriptions. Instead, you shall sell the paid membership in accordance to the user’s actions. For example, you can send sales-oriented notifications when the user has completed his basic training plan.

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Corporate Farming: Investment Opportunities

About 10,000 years ago, historians say, man began to domesticate grain yielding plants and settled down. Thus, agriculture is considered as the oldest of enterprises. It has undergone very many changes particularly in the last 100 years. Over the last century, technology has played the key role in restructuring agriculture and elevating it to the status of a modern, corporate business entity from what it was since the time of the earliest cultivation – the primary industry. Modern agricultural technology encouraged the participation of corporations in agriculture by bringing in investments, scale of economy and efficiency in resource use. Many believe that corporate farming destroys family farms because of the perceived effects on the rural agrarian economy. On the contrary, the proponents of corporate farming argue that corporatized agriculture leads to more efficient production and more social benefits. The numbers however speak for themselves. Since 1920s the number of farms in the U.S. has steadily dropped from around 6.5 million to 2 million. Similarly the proportion of population that lived on farms came down from 30 per cent to under 2 per cent.

Corporate farming: Towards efficient agricultural production
Historically, agriculture has been a family firm structure. This is due to interdependence of certain operations of farming with others and their interplay and seasonality. This, to a great extent, limited its ability to specialize and promote efficiency. In the past three decades or so, there is a surge of corporate influence on farming. The family farms mostly carried out their businesses locally- procuring inputs and selling their produce from the local markets. Corporate farms procure their inputs and source their working capital from large suppliers at huge discounts. Corporate farms can also access most modern technology and vertically integrate the entire process of production, value addition and marketing. When economies move from businesses that are dependent on natural cycles to those that are independent on such cycles, factory-style corporate industry will take hold of most businesses. Agriculture is not an exception to this. For instance, livestock farmers have been able to earn steady returns as the production technology improved and drastically reduced dependence of livestock production on nature. This makes livestock farming a perfect investment option for corporations. The ability of corporate sector to extract the benefits of economies of scale by way of minimizing input costs and maximizing output while leveraging technology to keep the risks under check, makes corporate farming a good business sense.

Corporate farming: Road ahead
In the globalized economy corporate farming is better equipped to bring out the farm products at the right time, place, quality and price to meet the consumer demand. Traditional family farms would certainly have difficulty in responding to the global market. Keeping in view the role of nature in the current state of grain farming technologies, there are still many negative externalities for corporations to enter this sector unlike livestock sector. Once the technologies enable corporate farms to ensure gains outweighing externalities, which is very likely in the near future, corporate farming will offer huge investment opportunities.

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