TF Recommenders: Encode user watch history using OpenAI embeddings

Introduction In this digital age of endless possibilities and vast information, recommendation systems have emerged as the guiding compass that helps us navigate through the overwhelming sea of choices. Whether it’s suggesting the perfect movie...

I Tested React Native’s New Architecture Improvements So You Don't Have To

Introduction If you want to build a mobile app, React Native is a great choice. Many advantages would make you pick this technology over others: reusing React Web devs, hybrid development, and the JavaScript community...

Atomic Design Systems on Figma (+ Figma community file!)

If you’re a designer who’s ever struggled to keep track of complex interfaces, then Atomic Design is something you’ll want to know. Imagine being able to break down complex interfaces into smaller, manageable parts; wouldn’t...

Mastering Infinite Scrolling with React Native

Introduction In today’s world of mobile apps, user experience is everything. And when it comes to delivering a seamless and engaging experience, infinite scrolling can be a game-changer. Whether it’s browsing through social media...

TypeScript Type Guards - An Introduction to Writing Safer Code

In a recent project, I was tasked with creating an endpoint that would parse and process files generated by the firmware of a device from a trained neural network. The device would send a JSON...

Streaming data sources with Kafka

Introduction In this blog post, we will introduce Apache Kafka, how it works, some of its use cases, and a comparison against RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS. Kafka is highly useful when trying to connect services...

Unlocking the Potential of Alpaca Trading API - A Comprehensive Guide

What is Alpaca Trading API? Alpaca API is a cutting-edge platform created by Alpaca Group, a US-based stock brokerage firm. It provides users with a robust infrastructure to develop algorithms for buying and selling...

Unleash the Power of Neobanking with SynapseFi - Your Guide to the Future of Finance

During the last couple of years and as a result of the digital transformation, Neobanks have grown and expanded rapidly. Their low-cost, seamless, and user-friendly digital experiences have secured its adoption throughout the world, and increasingly...

From Idea to MVP - The Journey of Designing a Tool for Practicing Sign Language

Initiatives are a big part of our work life here at Xmartlabs. From time to time, we’re encouraged to take a break from our normal work duties and dedicate some time to research, develop or study...

Building a zero-shot Sign Pose Embedding model

At Xmartlabs, our machine learning team set out to develop an innovative ML product last year. After careful consideration and collaboration with our Design team, we decided to focus on building a sign language practice assist...

Explore the Benefits of Fluttips - A Comprehensive Flutter Resource for Developers

Introduction At Xmartlabs, we believe in empowering young talent and providing them with training and professional instruction. We are committed to their technical development, which is a top priority for us. This is why we’ve...

How your business can take advantage of Big Data

Businesses and startups are constantly increasing in quantity, so the search for distinguishing from competitors and looking for competitive advantage is more critical than ever. Big Data and Analytics have presented themselves as one of the most effective ways to...

Introducing stock

October is a special month for Open Source contributors thanks to Hacktoberfest taking place. In this wonderful month, we are thrilled to announce Stock, Xmartlabs’ latest Flutter Open Source Project. What is Stock? Stock is...

The importance QA in the development process

Would you deliver an untested product to a customer? That’s a question every single company should be asking. When developing a software product, we must ensure we meet the quality a client expects as well as the established criteria in...

Get Flutter's offline support in Supabase

Supabase is one of the most well-known open-source alternatives to Firebase. Although Supabase implements many Firebase features, one that I constantly crave is offline support for the real-time database. In this blog post, we’ll cover how you can...

When and why should you go for AI on the edge?

AI on the Edge, or Edge AI, is a concept that people often disregard in their projects without an idea of how powerful it can be. In this blog, I’ll explain what edge AI is, its advantages and weaknesses (and...

Image Completion

In this blog, we will present the topic of image completion. With it, we’ll show its use cases, the relevance of this topic, and how to solve it using deep learning models. There is also a link to a repository...

Challenges of building a web with Flutter

Lessons learned from a nonconventional approach to flutter web development Recently a client approached Xmartlabs with the idea of making a platform that achieved excellent results by combining camera usage with MoveNet, an ML pose detection model. The challenge...

Polkadot Decoded - What’s it like?

At the end of June, the Polkadot community met in its thousands at Polkadot Decoded’s third edition, hosted in Buenos Aires. It was a unique experience, and through this brief blog, I’ll attempt to transmit what it felt like to...

Basic Infrastructure in AWS using Terraform

Managing cloud infrastructure doesn’t always go smoothly for developers. Choosing which cloud provider to use, configuring the private and public networks, and the required security of the infrastructure aren’t easy tasks, and they consume research, documentation, and implementation time. In...

Going International - The Ups and Downs of Being a Distributed Team

Uruguay: An over-saturated market Uruguay’s position as a market leader in digital development in LATAM can be (and has been) explained by several factors: Robust academia has been developing since...

Top EVM-compatible frameworks to build dApps - Truffle vs Hardhat

Web3.0 space is exploding right now. There’s an unprecedented demand for blockchain developers to build the next revolutionary dApp. But for those giving their first steps in the field, choosing a framework from all those available can be overwhelming. In...

A bright future ahead: React Native in App.js Conf 2022

Introduction Last week was the App.js Conf 2022 It has been almost two years since the App.js Conf 2020 was canceled due to the global pandemic. This year it came back as a hybrid event that allowed all developers...

Choosing the right blockchain for your next NFT project

Choosing the right blockchain is vital during the early development stage of an NFT platform. There are plenty of options that provide different capabilities, each having advantages and disadvantages. NFT DApps and their requirements are getting more sophisticated in terms...

#OnlyOneEarth - The Impact of Tech On The Environment

raw - #OnlyOneEarth In the universe are billions of galaxies, In our galaxy are billions of planets, But there is #OnlyOneEarth. Let’s take care of it. The IT industry plays a major role in generating a greener and...

The XL Way — Closing the Gender Gap

Building a Company Culture To Be Proud Of All experience is subjective. However, many of the experiences that Xmartlabs’ women shared on March 8 tended to sound similar to one another. With no intention of being cliché, it is...

Spoiler alert: User research is like a movie

I have two types of friends, the ones who don’t care for or even enjoy spoilers, and the ones (like me) who hate them. I usually have this conversation with them as I would often go in ‘blind’...

10 Years XL

It all started 11 years ago. I still remember the boom of mobile and social media from back then, a period when everything changed really fast. Innovation and VC funding for startups was peaking, and opportunities grew everywhere. All of...

Precision Agriculture And The Future of Farming with Machine Learning

Maintaining a plantation, whether it’s for forestry or crops, has never been more expensive (costs per acre in the US have risen 170% since the 70s). And this is partly due to the increasing costs of maintaining weed-free fields....

From Low to High-Quality Image — Practical Application of Super-Resolution Algorithms

Nowadays, everyone is exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) in one way or another. Computer vision is a popular application of AI through cellphones, video conference platforms, and video vigilance cameras, among other use cases. One fascinating problem to solve within the...

10 Things We've Learned After 10 Years Running A Tech Agency

Choosing to pursue a business in technology is often a difficult road with many changes and challenges. And if you think about it, startups have a flop rate of 90%; getting discouraged can be easy. Yet, the tech industry continues...

How To Get The Most Out Of A Recommendation Engine

Recommendation engines can rapidly increase online business revenue and boost customer loyalty, both crucial for sustainable growth. In this blog post, we’ll go through the main challenges, and pros and cons we faced implementing and deploying such solutions for a...

4 reasons why you should use Airflow's Taskflow API

Airflow introduced several changes in its second version a year ago. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to experience most of them. And we especially had a good time working with its new Taskflow API. After considering whether we should...

Occupancy Analytics powered by Edge-AI & Object Detection models

In a previous post, we covered computer vision and its application to body detection. Today, we’ll go a little bit deeper into the object detection problem showing an actual use case scenario: Lanthorn. What’s Lanthorn? Lanthorn is an Occupancy...

Our Solution for the NFL Helmet Assignment Kaggle Competition

Kaggle competitions attract thousands of data science and machine learning enthusiasts by providing access to various datasets and infrastructure with GPU availability and discussion forums to share ideas; this is very important for practitioners looking for a starting point. Here...

What's going on with crypto? (TC Disrupt 2021)

TechCrunch Disrupt is synonymous with trends and innovation. Fintech is an industry with considerable excitement since blockchain evolution is creating opportunities that startups are trying to leverage daily, and investors are trying to get that significant return. This hype...

Body Detection using Computer Vision

Being able to infer human bodies in images automatically has opened avenues for an array of real-life applications. Everyone, in one way or another, has used these technologies. If you’ve used Zoom (and almost everyone has in the past two...

Design your strategy like Google

Google owes its success to OKRs. At least that was what its former CEO, Larry Page, stated. As you may know, Google was not the first search engine, they got pretty late to the game (1996, whereas the first search...

What TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Taught Us About the Startup Landscape

Like in 2020, TC Disrupt took a digital format this year due to covid and the new delta variant hitting the US. However, the event managed to keep its essence: entrepreneurship, success stories, and alternative ways to adapt to this...

CoreML not fast enough? Use Bender!

Have you ever wanted to run a neural network model on iOS and found out that it runs too slow for your use case? We faced this problem and have gone through several options to reduce model inference time. We...

Find your missing pet with deep learning

Losing a pet can be a dramatic situation some families might go through. Immediately, social media posts with pictures of the pet emerge from both the owner and the finder. What happens then depends on multiple factors, such as their...

Our take on Testing UY 2021

Testing UY emerges in the year 2014 as a way to promote Testing in Uruguay and the region. The conference is 100% free and gathers groups of experts in different areas of knowledge, such as SQA, UI/UX, Management, among...

Introducing PagerTabStripView! - Finally a PagerView in pure SwiftUI

We’re incredibly thrilled to announce PagerTabStripView, the most powerful pager view entirely written in SwiftUI. Creating a production-ready pager view could take several hours, even days, for an engineering team. Apple...

Kickstart your Android Project with Gong Base Project

Starting a software project is not an easy task, and Android is no exception. There’s a bunch of complex decisions to make, such as code conventions, app architecture, frameworks, libraries, continuous integrations,...

Extending Material theme in Jetpack Compose

Building Android UIs with a consistent look and feel is easier than ever by using the new Jetpack Compose framework and setting up themes. Compose offers a Material theme implementation that makes it easy to use Material style...

Hindsight 20/20 - our year through the eyes of our team

How was the year for us? What did we achieve during 2020? An extremely challenging year for everyone; we were forced to leave our beautiful offices and stay at home for most of the year. Our team adapted quickly and...

Key metrics for growing digital startups

Ever since the bigger tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook realized the powerful role data plays in designing impactful products that attracts new users and retains older ones, they started paying more attention to which metrics they should be...

Announcing React Native Line v2!

We are happy to announce a new react-native-line version that supports the latest updates on the LINE SDK and it’s available to download via npm! When one of our projects called for an integration of sign in...

Sign in with Apple with SwiftUI

Apple recently updated Swift UI so that integrating Sign In With Apple through it is as seamless as it gets. This and all other new SwiftUI improvements are an indication that Apple is taking seriously the new state-driven, reactive, and...

Latest updates on Apple machine learning!

Every day we have greater incorporation of machine learning tools into the mobile world. Apple knows this and every year it improves its frameworks in different ways, also allowing integrating ML on their platforms to become easier and easier, up...

Frontend architecture and best practices for consuming APIs

As a developer, you’ll probably have to consume services provided by third-party code. This is true in many aspects of the trade: using a third-party library, interfacing with OS components, consuming web services. I’d even wager that in today’s development...

New to Jamstack? Everything you need to know to get started

Jamstack is a top trend in web development nowadays. Everyone is talking about the modern web development architecture. In this blogpost, I’m gonna cover what caused JAMSTack quick’s adoption, how’s the JAMStack community and ecosystem, and of course, what does...

How to stay mentally and physically healthy during covid-19 quarantine

We are now in the midst of a globalized pandemic, which is pretty much new for all of us. That’s why every day we find ourselves feeling exhausted by trying to make...

5 Practical Ways to Speed Up your Deep Learning Model

Did you obtain good accuracy with your deep learning model only to find out that inference time isn’t enough to deploy on production? Are you lost on how to optimize your model’s inference speed? Then this post is for you....

Android Navigation Component - Expectations, Conclusions & Tips - Part 1

This year the Google I/O conference was canceled, so I think it’s a good time to talk about one of Jetpack’s biggest Architecture component introduced last year, the Android Navigation Component. The aim of this series of...

What happened at AppBuilders?

After months of the uncertainty of how a fully online conference would work, and a lot of hard work from multiple teams around the world in order to make it work. I must say this has been one of the...

Should we automate all testing efforts?

Have you ever found yourself wanting full automation testing? Have you ever thought that everything should be automated? Then this post is for you. What is testing? Almost sure you’ve heard about manual...

We will be speaking about how we run OSS at App Builders 2020 conference!

AppBuilders Speakers! We are happy to announce that we will take part of the AppBuilders conference on May 12th at 11:45 am (GMT+1) and in this post we will talk about how we got there and how Covid-19 impacted...

Sign in with Apple! Is it necessary? at what cost?

In this post, we’ll debate about the benefits of providing Sign in with Apple in your app so you can decide if it worth integrating it or not. In the second part of this post we’ll provide a step by...

Powerful animations in React Native

In this blog post we’re going to present the main issues we ran into implementing complex animations in React Native at Xmartlabs. We’ll show how Reanimated helps achieving smooth animations and at which cost. After reading this blog post you...

iOS Continuous Integration & Delivery using Fastlane and Bitrise

In this post I’ll walk you through the Continuous Integration and Deployment set up used by Xmartlabs iOS team. We will configure Fastlane and Bitrise to automate the app release process to TestFlight. Why Continuous Integration and...

How to convert a NN model from TensorFlow Lite to CoreML

It’s been over a year since Apple has introduced Create ML, a framework that allows you to build neural network models in Swift and use them on iPhones and iPads with Core ML. However, the most common way of...

Our very first Hackathon!

Last month Xmartlabs held its very first hackathon! For those who are not familiar with the concept, a hackathon is an event where everyone who is involved in software development -be it graphic designers, project managers, software developers, etc- come...

Put your data to work: Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Well-informed, objective decisions have always been a key aspect of every successful business. Nowadays, lots of companies gather a huge amount of data as a result of different processes, i.e, marketing campaign results, web site analytics or customer information on...

SwiftUI looks quite… Fluttery

Good day everyone, so Apple just announced its new declarative UI Framework built from the ground up on Swift: SwiftUI. It’s for me the most interesting thing announced for developers at this year’s...

URL Splitting and React (Part 1)

As devices become more powerful, web apps tend to have heavier client-side logic. In particular, Single Page Applications (SPAs) have become very popular in these past years, with the advent of battle-tested frontend frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue....

Introducing Android Snapshot Plugin

We’re happy to announce the release of Android Snapshot Publisher, our first open source Android Gradle Plugin, a plugin to create Android Snapshot versions in the simplest way we know! Here at Xmartlabs we love engineering new products,...

Xmartlabs distinguished as top 10 mobile app developer in LATAM

Xmartlabs is a product development firm that caters the demands of high-growth startups and forward-thinking companies aiming to build transformational, mobile-first software products. We follow a lightweight process guided by agile principles to foster collaboration and flexibility. Our team is...

How NFC can help improve your business

NFC is a communication protocol that enables two devices to share data within a range of up to 4 cm, launched to the public in 2004. This technology is usually used to share personal or critical data between two devices,...

How AR can create an ROI for the enterprise

Due to recent breakthroughs in AR technology, mobile AR has suddenly become valuable for several specific use cases. These use cases include employee training, product visualization, visual search, and communication. Enterprises that adopt AR today stand to gain significantly in...

How to revolutionize your company with augmented reality

We at Xmartlabs have built an expert team around computer vision, machine learning, and augmented reality. In this segment, we’ll be sharing specific AR use cases we believe to be immediately practical and valuable for a range of industries.

Introducing Fountain Part Two

In the previous part we presented Fountain and shown a way, using the Listing component, to make the paging as cool and simple as possible. In that post we explained the first feature of the library,...

Introducing Fountain Part One

There are plenty of articles out there talking about the amazing Android Architecture Components, how we can combine them in an MVVM architecture and make them work as a charm. From my point of view, that’s true, the Android Architecture...

ML Kit on iOS and how it performs against Core ML

At Xmartlabs we have been closely involved in the nascent field of on-device Machine Learning. Our main focus has been Machine Learning on iOS and we have been exploring different use cases including style-transfer, human body pose detection and medical...

Sam McAfee - how to develop a game changer business idea in just 12 weeks?

About 9 of every 10 of your business ideas are going to fail. Would you try to reduce this percentage, or instead try to invalidate the non-viable ones and move on with THE great game changer idea?...

react-native-line-sdk, the react-native wrapper for LINE

A few days ago we released our very first React Native framework to the open source community. react-native-line provides an easy-to-use interface for you to use Line’s mobile SDK seamlessly on your app, without having to worry about Android...

EUREKA 4.0 is now available!

Eureka is a framework used to build forms in iOS, which has more than 1.000.000 downloads! In case you’re not familiar with it, you can start by reading Introducing Eureka iOS form library written in pure Swift or visit...

Introducing Xniffer, the Swift network profiler built on top of URLSession!

Do you often want to debug or monitor external service responses in you app, recognize latency and work with the data you receive back? Same happens to us! That’s why we created Xniffer , a non intrusive framework to...

TechCrunch Disrupt 2017 - Takeaways of one of tech's most important events of the year

The event A few weeks ago our team attended TechCrunch Disrupt SFO. Although this wasn’t our first time at the event, we got there with great expectations. We already knew...

How to Make Quick Strategic Decisions With a 1 Week Design Sprint. Part 2

We’ve already introduced the basics of using a 1 week Design Sprint for idea validation when starting a new project, if you haven’t read it we suggest having a look at this article. It’s time to...

How to Make Quick Strategic Decisions With a 1 Week Design Sprint. Part 1

First Part Creating a new business or product from scratch is no easy task. During this process, you’ll have to wear lots of hats, from accounting to finance, programming, marketing and sales. In this context, working...

Easy Continuous Delivery in Android with Jenkins

Today I want to show how we can release Android SNAPSHOT versions using Beta by Fabric. Have you ever been in a situation where you release new features between long periods of time and find yourself with tons of...

iOS 11 has arrived!!

Since September 19, iOS 11 is available to be upgraded in your devices; and there are some changes that will surprise you! This new release includes new features and technologies such as… don’t be so anxious and see all the...

Ahoy - The Onboarding Library You Were Asking For

We’re pretty sure you’ll need to include an onboarding library in the iOS App you’re building. In order to speed up the time spent in development while giving the developers freedom to build an awesome experience for their users, we...

Introducing Bender

2 months ago we introduced Bender: a framework for real-time Neural Networks inference. And we wanted to talk a bit about it :) Nuts & Bolts of Bender You may have a Machine Learning model you want to...

GitHub 2016 round up

Almost a month into the new year, the yearly summaries and annual resolutions posts season is definitely over. We have been working in Data Analysis for a while (in stealth mode for the most part, shame on us!) but we...

The First Eureka Webinar

Eureka is Xmartlabs’ elegant form builder for Swift iOS, built and refined for the open source community to accelerate the development cycle and produce cleaner code. There are over 14k apps currently...

Introducing Ecno!

Have you ever been using UserDefaults to store something that the user did in the past and then check whether or not he did it? Maybe you wanted to display certain tutorial or prompt the user to subscribe...

Creating your own rows for Eureka - Part 2

Some days ago, we released the introduction to create custom rows for Eureka, now we are going to go deeper and see how to build a complex row. Note: for those who are starting, I strongly recommend reading...

Creating your own rows for Eureka

It’s been almost a year since Eureka’s first release and many developers have been using it since then. We are thankful for all the valuable support and contributions received. If you are not familiar with what Eureka is and how...

Making a JS plug-in: a full-stack approach

In this occasion we will introduce a way to create a client side JavaScript plug-in that can be easily integrated in any third party websites. This plug-in will allow us to execute custom actions such as filling a registration form...

XMARTLABS chosen to speak at "Swift With The Best"

This Saturday, June 25th, the world’s top Swift developers will unite at Swift With The Best, the largest online conference series for mobile developers. Our team will have two speakers at the conference. Mathias Claassen will talk about

Debugging an Annotation Processor in your project

The purpose of this post is to explain how to debug an annotation processor in the context of any Android Studio (or IntelliJ) project. It is common that you may want to know what is happening in your codebase with...

CI and automatic deployment to iTunes Connect with Xcode Server

In this post I’m going to write about my experience and the problems I faced when setting up Xcode Server for CI and automatic deployment to iTunes Connect at Xmartlabs. I’m going to let you know how I could solve...

You've won a WWDC 2015 Scholarship

I know a lot of time has passed since the last WWDC, but still, I wanted to share my first WWDC experience. Hope you like it....

Introducing Eureka! - Elegant iOS forms in Pure Swift 2

We are incredibly excited to announce Eureka!, our first Swift open source project designed to easily build dynamic table-view forms. Why we built Eureka! April last year we released XLForm, an open source obj-c iOS library to build dynamic...

Android logging with Crashlytics and Timber

It’s an annoying problem to have crashes in your Android app. Obviously you want to avoid them, nobody wants their users getting mad at the app when it crashes. On top of that, you might also want to have some...

XLForm: Using NSPredicates to change form structure.

In almost every app you might ever build you will have a profile and settings view and they may also have many forms. Using XLForm we speed up the development time spent on these view controllers. XLForm allows us...

Xmartlabs Open Source Culture

Since the past two years we have been in the world of OSS releasing different projects and contributing to community projects through bug reports and fixes, you can check out all our projects at Xmartlabs Github account. At Xmartlabs...

LinkedIn for Work, pt. 2 : Finding candidates.

The decision to hire a candidate is usually based more on intuition than on raw information analysis. A digital tool like LinkedIn becomes essential to...

LinkedIn for Work

Since you’re probably reading this article in-between checking feeds, you already know that social media is now very present in your day-to-day activities. It can certainly...

Now with more UXD!

There are no specific instructions to make something people love. At XmartLabs, we offer you an approach to developing a deep relationship between your product and your users through our UXD methodology and services. We’ll help you reduce the frustration...

Speakers at JIAP 2013

Tomorrow we will be part of an event organized by the Uruguayan Computer Professionals Association known as JIAP 2013. With 4.000+ attendees is one of the main tech events in Uruguay, and takes place in...

WWDC 2013 - Apple Worldwide Developers Conference - June 10-14, San Francisco

The most important apple developers conference is coming. The 2013 edition will be starting next Monday, and apple will be introducing the new products and software features. For this year, there is huge expectation about iOS 7, the most...

Summary: RubyConf UY 2013

Xmartlabs at RubyConf Uruguay 2013

We are very happy to announce that Xmartlabs is Silver Sponsor of the RubyConf Uruguay, which will take place at Torre de las Telecomunicaciones auditorium in Montevideo, on March 22-23. Maximo and Martin will...

Geographic chat app with Node.js, Socket.IO, and Google Maps - Part three

In this series of posts we are going to show you how to use node.js and Socket.IO to build a simple chat application, and then mix it up with Google Maps and the Geolocation API to create a cool geographic app....

Geographic chat app with Node.js, Socket.IO, and Google Maps - Part two

Part one | Part three In this series of posts we are going to show you how to use node.js and Socket.IO to build a simple chat application, and then mix it up with...

Xmartlabs moves to LATU

We are very happy to announce that Xmartlabs is moving to Ingenio Business Incubator, located in the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU). Ingenio has the financial support of the Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN), the Inter-American Development Bank...

Geographic chat app with Node.js, Socket.IO, and Google Maps - Part one

Part two | Part three In this series of posts we are going to show you how to use node.js and Socket.IO to build a simple chat application, and then mix it up...

Xmartlabs in Startup Weekend Montevideo

Startup Weekend Montevideo took place: an event organized all over the world in which local entrepreneurs participate in the process of making a startup in two days. Of course, Xmartlabs was there. In Uruguay, this event...

Automatic update timestamps and date-time manipulation using js.

Behold this awesome scripts that will make your timestamp web development much easier... timeago The first one (a jquery plugin) enable us to automatically update timestamps in html sites. It's very useful for keeping relative...

Receive SMS online free of charge

It is a common practice nowadays to be asked for a SMS number while registering to a site. Most of us do not want to share our phone number on the net to avoid being spammed, making it impossible...

Welcome!

Hi everybody, be welcomed to the xmartlabs blog. The idea of this blog is to post some insights of our work and share tips and data related to the projects we tackle. We will also keep it updated with info...