What Is SaMD? 10 Software Acronyms to Know
Have you ever talked with a software developer or someone who is really in tune with the software industry? If you have, you know that, at times, it can feel like they are talking in a foreign language or using a secret code. If you’re not in the know, it can be hard to know what they’re saying.
If you don’t know your SaMD from your LMNOP, that’s OK. In order to “speak software”, you need to know the terms. Many of the most prominent terms software people use are acronyms – letters that represent the first letters of a larger term – as long as you know the terms the acronyms represent, this alphabet soup becomes a little easier to understand and remember.
To help you sound more like a pro, or at least not completely miss what a software expert is saying the next time you converse, we put together some of the most popular and common acronyms in the software space. here you know how can you develop a SaMD Product.
Here are 10 software acronyms to know.
API – Application Programming Interface
This term refers to the way two kinds of software or software and hardware interact. The API allows these two entities to “talk” to each other without developers having to be intimately familiar with the other technology. For example, if you are designing an app for an Android phone, you don’t have to know how the phone works to access its features with an API.
FTP – File Transfer Protocol
This is the standard way computers communicate to share files. When a server holds files for a computer network and a client (a computer on the network) needs files, it uses FTP to get these files from the server. This is built into self-contained systems but some FTP software enables cross-platform computers to share files.
HTML – HyperText Markup Language
When you access a web page, all you see is the text on the page. However, additional text on the page, that you don’t see, tells your web browser what to show you on the page. This unseen text is known as HTML. This language is the foundation for all HTML web pages. An example of HTML is, when you see an image on a web page, there is an HTML tag behind it. You don’t see this on the page but what the page sees is <img />. This tells the page that a specific part of the page is an image.
IDE – Integrated Development Environment
An IDE is an all-inclusive software development system that allows programmers to basically do everything they need to do to develop software programs. It allows developers to code, edit text, and debug software. When they have done all that, programmers can run the necessary tests on the software to make sure the code is working properly. It is a developer’s one-stop-shop for creating software.
SaMD – Software as a Medical Device
This type of software is helping revolutionize the medical industry. The software provides a medical benefit such as treating, preventing, or diagnosing disease. It does this on its own, without the help of another medical device. SaMD can be run with computers, tablets, smartphones, or wearable devices. Orthogonal’s guide to SaMD contains a detailed explanation of what qualifications are necessary for software to qualify as a medical device.
SDK – Software Development Kit
This is a kit platforms provide to software developers to give them the tools they need to make software that is compatible with their platforms. This can include information about the APIs for the platform as well as the overall parameters the software needs to meet to run on the platform. An SDK may even include its own IDE (see above) wherein developers can create the entire software program.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO is one of the most widely-used terms in software and all of the tech in 2021. It is an incredibly important tool for business marketing. SEO is the process of creating web pages and content to increase both the quantity and quality of traffic to your site. The idea behind SEO is to make sure everything is geared towards being properly read, or “crawled”, by a search engine (specifically Google’s) algorithm. The better the SEO, the higher your pages will appear on a search engine results page (SERP), which will lead to more clicks. Several types of SEO exist including national, local, and technical.
SQL – Structured Query Language
Whereas HTML is a language used to communicate with a web page and FTP helps a client computer communicate with a server, SQL is a programming language that helps a computer communicate with a database or, as it’s called in software terminology, a relational database management system (RDBMS). Some well-known RDBMS that would use SQL includes Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, and Access.
UI – User Interface
The UI of software denotes anything the end-user will interact with. This can be on-screen graphics, buttons, words, or app icons. Internal software may not provide a UI but any user-facing software will have some aspect of UI. UI can be very important when determining how well and how fast users adopt a certain software.
UX – User Experience
Unlike UI software, UX is not about what the user uses, it is about how the user uses the software. UX includes things like how visually pleasing, user-friendly, or intuitive a software is. This also plays a big role in popularity and adoption. A bad UX will turn users away; a good design, will make the UX of using the software much easier and more enjoyable. This makes UX designers a vital part of the creation process.
Conclusion
After reading the terms above, you may still not be able to take the APIS and IDEs in an SDK and create the UX and UI you need for a great SaMD product, but at least you might now have a general idea of what this sentence means. And, knowing their meanings will help you understand and better communicate with the people who use these terms every day.
