nEraLab Presentation

Next steps in the our life's journey

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Presentation of the new site

The first article of the blog I wanted it to be the presentation of the new look of the site and the mission I gave myself starting from the name of my project: nEraLab.

I’ve decided that was the moment to change the previous site (plain-HTML) into one with the possibility to have also a blog. I would like to tell the reader all the experiences of this journey describing the birth of the developed applications. This will allow the clients (actual and potentials) to know better the products available into the site. I consider the user as the most important  part of a project. To have feedbacks and understand how a product can be improved giving the user more value is fundamental. This give me a big satisfaction.

I wanted for the new site a simple structure. It has a single initial page, so to enhance the developed applications and the last blog articles. Sometimes it’s difficult to summarize in an AppStore description the reasons that led to the development of an application or its strengths. This can be done instead with a blog post, which is designed to deepen and explain to users the choices made in the implementation phase.

The journey to nEraLab

We come now to nEraLab, when it was born and why. A few years ago, it was 2009, with a friend of mine we had set up the MitAPP project. It was focused on mobile development for the Apple devices. We had started almost as a game and within 6 months we found ourselves overwhelmed with requests for iPhone applications. All this without the use of advertising or paid marketing but simply through the word of mouth of the customers.

A couple of years later, MitAPP has been acquired by a small Italian company. Unfortunately, in just over a year everything ended with the definitive closure of the company.

I’ve continued to carry on my software development activity on C++, Python and Javascript/NodeJS. After another year, the desire to get involved in something challenging has come back overwhelmingly.

nEraLab (new Era Laboratory) is born. A new era of my life, in which to work on the development of applications designed by me. The idea is to develop useful products that make users’ lives more efficient and easier.

Brief description of the products

Font Studio is the first product developed. It borns from a practical need to choose the right font for a text. Instead of repeatedly applying different formatting to a selected text, Font Studio displays the text with all the fonts available on your Mac. This drastically reduces the time to choose the right font. Another example is the iPhone and Apple Watch application: What’s Happened On This Day. It was born at the time of the presentation of the first Apple Watch version. I wanted to create something that had to do with time and at the same time was informative. It shows the events that occurred in the past years corresponding to the today’s day. It is a sort of time machine that allows us to remember past events and anniversaries. I then devised the Kronos Time Tracker to keep track of application development time and costs in the easiest and most agile without too many frills. In applications and more in general in the software development, I’ve always believed that simplicity was a strong point and not a weakness. When things are simple, people learn them quickly, use them easily and developers manage them quickly.

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