I have a good mobile plan so I dont bother if some data are sent over the mobile network when I do NearbyShare transfers, if it help the speed to improve somewhat. Is NearbyShare actually using mobile network at all (there is a ticker-box that says that it should send small files via mobile network)?
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I'm working on adding sharing support to my iPhone app. Right now, I'm using Bonjour to create plain TCP connections over a wifi network. This works great, except that it turns out that many wifi networks in the real world (for example, those at Starbucks and other chains) forbid Bonjour publishing and discovery over their networks.
So that limits the usefulness of sharing, since one of the use cases we imagined was that people could bump into each other where wifi was available and seamlessly share data with each other.
Is Bluetooth a viable alternative for this? We're sending large amounts of data (PNG images) over the wire, so latency and throughput might be one issue.
(I'm also interested in any other ways to make it easy to transfer data between two iPhone apps)
we are looking at getting a barcode scanning application built. We are considering using PhoneGap but our only worry is speed.
All the application will do is just scan a barcode and check a server to see if it's valid or not. The application uses the camera very intensely to scan the barcode via an image.
My main question is, will scanning via phonegap be just as fast as a native app? Speed is really important as the user will have to scan multiple barcodes very quickly.
Phonegap uses the same native APIs, it just abstracts them so that you can write your application in html and javascript. The time to take a picture or any other native process is less important than the time the user perceives. This is the portion of the native execution time that you need to expose to the user + Abstraction API time + UI responsiveness.
There is always an overhead from an abstraction but I think that's negligible in an app like this (in phones newer than BB OS5). The current issues originate from the hardware rendering the HTML and the browser software installed on the device.
A lot of BlackBerry phones don't use webkit (OS5 and below) and the the browsers they do use can seem very sluggish while rendering webapps. BB OS versions less than 5 don't have a production worthy way of communicating between the native and javascript layers, the hack that's often seen is to set and poll for changes in cookies. Android has always had a good design for JavaScript to native interaction afaik.
BlackBerry phones and many lower end Android phones don't have GPU's, or some Android phones that do have GPU's don't compile webkit for the GPU! Without this your UI app may
have that sluggish feel, pages/buttons take that bit longer to respond which is very noticeable when you're trying to whiz through menus.
This has improved a lot since phonegap was released. UI lag should continue to decrease to a point where even new low end phones are production ready for webapps. But from my experiences we've not yet reached that point in 2011.
The phone's built-in software is what does the scanning and camera action. PhoneGap will only trigger the event and help transfer the data but the phone does all the work.
As others noted the html5-based UI may feel sluggish. Maybe it's not an issue; you just have to try it and see. For scanning a barcode and uploading to a server the Phonegap overhead might not be signficant.
I have developed a smartphone app where barcode scanning is an alternative to the primary function of scanning an image which is recognized by picture matching technology. I use PhoneGap. I have not compared this to native app performance. I am able to say that for my basic UI (it is a web app for the smartphone), my web pages are rendered fast enough not to be an issue. This performance has been observed on a 600MHz smartphone CPU (LG Optimus One running Android 2.2.1).
The picture matching as well as barcode scanning is done on a server backend, not on the smartphone itself. The issue becomes one of networking speed from smartphone over WiFi or service provider network, over the Internet and onto the server - then there is the response from server back to smartphone. The processing speed of picture matching or barcode scanning has to be less than a second (ideally half a second) so that by the time networking delay is added, it is still a 1-2 second response time for the user.
The image files that I am transferring from smartphone to server is targeted to be around 40KB. At a typical 54Mbps WiFi network or the going rate of around 40Mbps in HSPA+ service provider networks, I find the performance of my app to be suitable. Even with a fair signal WiFi speed of 15Mbps, end-user response is acceptable between 1-2 seconds.
The pace of smartphone development (dual core processors) and service provider networks (4G HSPA+) will only take the industry higher. It is a tremendous opportunity for apps development moving forward.
Side Topic:
I am using Zbar code on the server for barcode scanning and I am hunting for better alternatives. The challenge with ISBN barcode scanning from smartphones having non-zoom, non-macro lens is that the typical barcode size is too small for "simple" barcode scanning algorithms to work properly. I'd like to hear about alternatives and people's experience with barcode scanning. I would be looking for code that I can deploy in my server backend, as opposed to running smartphone resident barcode scanning.
What is the best way to get ocropus running on iOS and/or android?
I'm interested in using Ocropus to digitize some content on mobile devices. I'm largely interested in using a trained 'language' model to make predictions on the device. Training will occur offline and off device. I know a few people have got tesserect running on mobile devices, but I'm unable to find much information on doing the same with Ocropus. I'd greatly appreciate a slice of your collective wisdom in an effort to avoid wasting days taking the wrong path.
Would it be easier to just prototype the algorithm using the scripts, then grab the specific c++ code of interest and include it directly in my application. Or best to compile as a static/dynamic library?
It would be better setting up a simple web service that uses Ocropus or any OCR library for that matter. Then have your smartphone application make requests to the web service. OCR is a CPU intensive process, so it's appropriate to move it off of the phone.
I want to send some Text plus a image from one iphone application to other iphone app but restriction is I should not use a web server in between communication,Is there any way to fulfill it ?
Details: There are two independent devices and could be far enough say out of network. My requirement one app adds some text with a image and sends it to another iphone which can be at any long distance , and the app installed in another iphone will read that info and image into itself.
Actually there is a solution that meets your needs — and that fits to bbums answer:
Create a HTTP-Server on the iPhone, using cocoahttpserver. than you will ask some webservice like whatismyip.com for your public ip. with this your iPhone can be connected worldwide.
But very likely ur wifi-network is not forwarding your port to the iPhone. Ash.
And even if: Now it gets difficult. How to publish your ip from one phone to the other? hmmm... — I got it: I will exchange the information in a centralized space! In the web!
... wait — that would be a Webserver.
You see: Without any kind of server in the Web the users would need to exchange ip manually and have full admin power and knowledge about the local network.
So IMHO bbums answer is the only way to go.
PS: I am working with http server running on iPhones. In local network that works great, especially with bonjour. And you can use them over distance network — but only with reconfiguration of your router — something you shouldn't force your user to do
There is far from enough information to provide a specific answer.
two apps on two different devices?
are the two devices on the same network?
are the two devices both on WiFi?
do you need the user to receive a notification or something if the app isn't running?
If on same device, you can define a custom URL handler in the destination app and then openURL: in the source app to pass the data over. Encode your image and text into the URL, but be careful of size limitations.
If on different devices, there are many possible solutions, but answering the above questions will be critical to actually knowing what solution is appropriate.
Given your comment -- two apps, different devices, arbitrary networks -- then you are going to have to have some kind of server in between. Note that the recently added Game Center does have the ability to rendezvous two users, but it has a very particular user experience that may not be appropriate to your needs.
I would suggest that you investigate using push notifications to notify the receiving user of the availability of content. As for moving the content between, no direct connection is possible and you will have to have some kind of store-and-forward server in between. And, yes, a web server is going to be the easiest possible solution simply because HTTP is ubiquitous these days.
If there's no network of any kind available, but both parties have amateur radio licenses, then hooking the two devices up to HF packet radios might work.
THIS is super EASY.
I would code up some software that can turn data into modem signal, like the good old dial up modem. The device would actually make those annoying buzzing sounds.
You get the phone number for your friends nearest landline and call him.
He places his iPhone near the phones receiver in listen mode and you connect to his phone using your audible modem.
Bingo, via the power of sounds you have sent data which is decoded on his device and all for the very cheap price of a phone call, there are pretty cheap these days especially if you use Skype.
Easy Way (relatively speaking)
A way two apps on different networks can communicate without setting up a web server of some sort is as follows.
Use an existing third party storage system like DropBox.
Each app would need the login and password for your DropBox. Then both apps can read and write files that the other app can see.
An existing app that does this is a shopping list app called ShopShop.
The app on my phone and my wife's phone both link to the same DropBox account and the app keeps the shopping list synced up when one of us adds something to the list.
I'm working on iPhone app that will let users upload/download photos to/from a DB server along with some data associated with each photo.
While I do have experience with iPhone programing, I do not have much experience with DB and server side programing.
Does anyone have any tips on what would be the easiest way to set up DB server and handle requests and responses coming from the iPhone. This server may be potentially required to handle large amount of traffic and preserve data integrity. Several iPhone users might be attempting to upload and modify data associated with each photo at the same time.
I'm thinking of opening a hosted server account so I don't have to purchase hardware and run it from home. Any tips on a company that provides quality and affordable server and DB hosting would be much appreciated.
If you know some Python or Java, you could take a look at Google AppEngine.
It is designed to scale and the entry costs are very low (i.e. free).
You do not have to worry about any infrastructure hosting as it is all provided for you.
The only catch is that it is:
Harder to get data out of the platform if you decided to move off it to another system
Does not support push notifications (However there are a lot of push notification providers out there you can hire)