I am hiring a freelancer to develop a social networking app for iPhones with event creation, messaging, etc. He asked me if I was going to provide web services/api. I am completely new to app and web development so I am not sure how to answer. If I provide those things, what do I need to do?
Thanks.
you need to get it very clear in your head what you want to build before you hire a freelancer. If you don't you'll be in a costly world of pain very quickly.
So, sit down and think, if you have a friend developer maybe you can have a chat with him and decide the architecture of the product.
What that guy asked you is if you need an API to provide data which is a fair question. Think of a source of your data where other applications can connect and interact with it.
The answer is yes you will need an api because all the mobile clients need to connect to something and that something will be an Api. The Api will be the bridge between your data and your clients. The data will reside into a database so that's another thing to consider.
As I said, think very well what you want because the quality of what any freelancer will build, depends on the quality of information you provide. If it's not clear in your head then it won't be pretty.
Related
I apologize if this is not the right place to ask this but I am new to IOS development and I can not seem to find any information about this topic anywhere. Maybe I am just not looking in the right places, but I would appreciate it if you could point me to some resources or provide me some suggestions.
I am looking to construct an app clip which can handle api communication. I believe this is possible because a lot of the app clip examples online seem to suggest the technology is useful for quickly completing a transaction (ex. Panera bread app clip) and I don’t assume they are completing the entire transaction locally in a 15 mb application. So that makes me assume at some point in the application they are communicating with an api. I read the apple documentation and they mentioned that the urlsession library is not available for app clips, so I was wondering how else would we communicate from the app clip with the api, ideally in a background scenario as to not bother the user experience. Thank you in advance!
This is a simple question on a (probably) complicated topic.
I'm in the process of trying to build an app in which multiple users are invited into a session by a single user.
If they accept, I would like the session admin/host's device to control the views on the devices of all the users in that session.
I have searched high and low, Google, StackOverflow, Treehouse etc. but whenever I suggest multiple users or type the question as I have here I get responses that demonstrate how to make an app capable of supporting multiple users on one device, or similar.
The question is simply: is what I want to do possible? Is it safe? Does anyone have a resource that would get me started in learning about how to code this scenario.
Thanks in advance,
Kyle.
Easy as pie - you use PubNub for exactly that.
demo similar to your problem:
https://www.pubnub.com/developers/demos/codoodler/
(That demo is in-browser, but it's equally easy to do inside an app - assuming you're an experienced app developer of course!)
more demos:
https://www.pubnub.com/developers/demos/
I can tell you're new at mobile development. Do understand that:
A) In general programming is extremely difficult. Programming mobiles in particular has a lot of fussy knowledge needed as well as broad general engineering skills.
B) We really live in the "age of BAAS" - "platforms" such as PubNub, FireBase, Parse, Realm, Couchbase and so on. (These days you can't really be an "app programmer" .... you can't get a job "programming an iPhone". You get a job doing Firebase development, happening to be on iPhone - you know?)
I believe Apple has documentation on this very topic:
https://developer.apple.com/reference/multipeerconnectivity
The trickier part will be how do you send back and forth data that allows the host to "control" the views of the other devices. If by "control" you want to let the host control things that are outside of your app (like a screen share) I don't believe that will be possible.
I have been searching and googling different ways to build a central scoring server for a golf tournament but have not found any dead set answers on how I can do this. What I'm looking for is some advice on how I should implement this. I do have a background in programming in Objective-C as I have created a couple of iPhone apps and I'm not afraid of trying and learning new things. I will explain what I envision and if I could get some suggestions on how to start, that would be great.
a. My golf tournament would have about 80 people playing in it.
b. I would have 5 volunteers with iPhones stationed around the golf course to collect scores from the players as they finish a couple of holes.
c. The volunteer would enter the scores into an app on the iPhone. The app would then send the scores to the central scoring server to update a giant leader board at the clubhouse.
My questions are what kind of database should I use? I'll need something that is very user friendly as I'll need to be able to make quick changes to the database on the fly if required. The iPhones will not share the same network as the central server as they would most likely be on 3G out on the golf course. For now, the iPhone app that is sending scores to the server, will not be in the app store as I will build the app through an ad Hoc profile.
Any help, suggestions or advice would greatly be appreciated.
You would presumably need a hosted service of some sort that each instance of your iPhone app would send its data to. Typically those hosted services are implemented in other languages/technology stacks like Java, PHP, or Ruby/Rails. The server app would then persist data into a database: MySQL is a commonly used solution, but there are a lot of options with different strengths and weaknesses depending on your specific requirements.
If a hosted server application isn't somewhere you want to go, and if your requirements are simple enough, you could look into a file-based server solution. For example, you could build your iPhone app to place scores in a small file on a Dropbox folder and then write a standalone app that collects those small files and does whatever you want with the data.
Hope that helps
If you have little experience with servers, you might also consider one of the new server-in-a-can services like parse, stackmob, or kinverse. There's quite a bit involved in building/maintaining a server, especially if you need it to scale.
HI all,
so we all know "pinch media" - the "spyware" software ;)
i'm searching for some really cool analytics softwares for my iphone application.
pinch media, is the one i know, it looks really great, but we all know, the reputation of this piece of software is very bad.
i'd like to know if i can use it, or if my app then is one of this spyware apps, for users (it isnt really, i know, but users might think it is, when i use this).
are there some alternatives? other programms, with the same good analysis?
I found admob and motally.com, but pinch media/Flurry is the best one atm.
Here is a good pdf that compares some of the main iPhone/iPod touch analytics providers
Try Google Analytics
Any analytics package which reports usage statistics back to a central server (Flurry, Google Analytics, etc.) will be considered "spyware" by some users, not just Pinch Media's offering. The really paranoid users will sniff data traffic out of your application and detect traffic from any service, no matter who provides it.
If you really care about those users who will be upset by this, give them the option to opt-out of data collection in your application's settings or when the application first starts.
If you are looking for more inside on your app, you should try heatma.ps. They let you view heatmaps for your app, and other interaction data.
Example heatmap:
I suggest you to take a look at Appsee
Appsee provides visual in-app analytics, including heatmaps, real user recording and user bahavior reprots. And you can create a free account there.
Flurry, Google Analytics, etc are central server to store the user's data.
If you want to build your private data center. you can visit this url
http://www.github.com/cobub
And the web site is: http://dev.cobub.com
to get the open source system (both server and client sides)
There are two kinds of analytics: business analytics and app performance analytics. Google Analtyics, Flurry etc are good for business analytics but app developers are mostly interested in knowing when app crashes, being able to capture app logs, impact of network speeds and carriers on performance of their apps. For app performance analytics, take a look at http://apigee.com/about/mobile-analytics . You not only get real time performance anlaytics but also ability to do some configuration changes in real time.
We have a web application and we've built phone applications (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) to be companions to the site. The usual workflow is that an existing user of the site gets a phone app and then plugs their existing credentials into the phone app and they are off and running, but more often now we are seeing folks who are downloading the app and then (and this should not surprise anyone) don't read the help screen that explains they need to go and get credentials at the web site and therefore cannot connect to the application which does require registration to manage their content. This is a giant usability fail condition.
So we know that we need to put user registration workflows on the phone app.
Other than the obvious solution of duplicating our registration page on the mobile, does anyone know of a better identity solution for the phone? For example, on the desktop we also use Facebook Connect as an identity server and the users love it. I'm looking for something that simple that we can implement across the major smartphone platforms.
Clarifying note:
I should add here that this registration mechanism is likely to; and it would be desirable if it did, go hand in hand with a general identity/authorization mechanism such as the Facebook mechanism mentioned below.
One other place I'm poking around is to see whether there's an openId solution that does not require a browser to pop up.
Restful service might be the e asiest way for you to achieve this, you can use it on any device that can make http requests, so you can make your own login screens and talk to the s ervice that way...
Facebook has a Connect API for the iPhone. Integrating it into your iPhone app is very smooth.
http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php
On the BlackBerry we were able to build a fairly robust REST pipeline between the client apps in the field and our servers. We primary use the framework for updates, but the device API is generic enough to be able to build almost anything you need via standard HTTP/HTTPS GET/POST calls.
On the RIM platform, look into the HttpConnection API as a starting point. There is also an example on the BlackBerry Developer's site which will help. Finally, I believe there are several examples inside the sample package that comes with every BlackBerry JDE (IDE + API download).