You know those apps that let you draw on your screen for presentations (or youtube tutorials).
Does something like that exist but sync'd across the web so you and your friends can both share your screens like a whiteboard?
Yes and no. There are features like this in many telecommunications apps but nothing that strictly serves this purpose.
I would check out flapdraw.
Related
I'm developing an app that will focus heavily on giving users routes and turn-by-turn directions while driving. It is important that they stay within the app during their drive, so I really don't want to make them leave the app and go to the built-in Maps app. I have been doing a lot of research lately on how to include this functionality, and it is widely known that it is not easy, since Apple doesn't include this functionality in the SDK out of the box. It looks like my options are:
For providing routes (and directions) from one place to another
Use a UIWebView and load some web-based maps with JavaScript, and use the JavaScript API to draw a route
Use MapKit or the Google Maps iOS SDK, query for the route sepaartely through an API, and manually draw some kind of path or polyline on top of it.
Use a library that costs money (like MTDirectionsKit)
For providing turn-by-turn navigation
Use a proprietary library that comes with its own maps (like CloudMade)
Is there anything I'm missing here? What are the pros and cons of each, and how should I pick a solution?
Your insight is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
You say that you don't want to "make" the user leave the app and use the built in software for turn by turn navigation as though this is a bad user experience. A bad user experience would be getting forced to use a turn by turn nav from a webView or some API which would not show up as routing information on my lock screen if I lock the phone or cut into other applications to display banners telling me a turn is coming up, for example, while I'm listening to music on my phone. I strongly suggest you launch Apple maps and let the system handle what it is meant to handle instead of trying to build your own turn by turn navigation and heavily limiting the user from the freedom of exiting the application during a drive.
While on the subject of commercial libraries you might what to take a look at other options:
skobbler/telenav sdk - in-app routing and turn-by-turn navigation based on OpenStreetMap (same maps used by Cloudmade and Mapquest). Check out the demos and the licensing plans and figure out if it's the correct solution for you
(they have a Free Tier that might be good enough for your app - and if you go above that tier I think you should be considering monetizing you app)
and that's about it for the time being (besides the options already named): keep an eye out for Mapbox as they could provide an iOS sdk in the near future - with routing and navigation
I agree with Kris' response. Turn-by-turn navigation is probably best handled by the built-in app. However, for displaying a route and ETA on a 2D map, I think I'm going to go with the Mapquest iOS API, which offers this functionality for free. I didn't know this solution was available until today.
I would like to have an app which simple opens different websites for different languages. So the main purpose of the app is simple to redirect to an web app. My questions:
does Apple allow such apps (in the Appstore of course) ?
how can it be achived to be listed in the different istores (by country, according to the language)
how to I open different websites for different languages?
Thank You!
Apple does allow Apps that just contain UIWebView pointing to a website.
Use NSString *countryCode = [locale objectForKey: NSLocaleCountryCode];
to find the Country code
Using a simple condition, set the URL relavent to the country code.
1) Yes, it is allowed, though discouraged and highly annoying. I immediately uninstall apps that do this.
2) You'll have to setup localization for your app for each language you would like to represent
3) You simply setup a web site, and write it in the language you would like on the site. Localization will save time here, too.
Although this might draw some traffic to your sites, it is not a good business model and you should probably try to make your app do something of benefit for the user. If your app is useful, you will get more than enough traffic to your sites through gentle prodding or in-app announcements of some kind.
Where do you usually grab graphics for your iPhone apps?
Are any free official repos from Apple or one have to buy everything from thirdparty artists?
For example, does anyone know where I can find close button image like one one on this screenshot? Or it is private image?
365psd.com is one of my favorite places to find some brilliantly beautiful interface elements. They give you the PSD, instead of just the PNG, so that you can scale it or modify it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphic design.
Apple doesn't really provide any images other than the system tab- and bar-button items. Most developers just end up making their own or getting them from third parties, paid or otherwise. A search for “iPhone UI template” might well turn up something like what you're after, probably for free or on reasonable licensing terms.
If you're looking specifically for a “close”/“delete” button, I made one a while ago, though it looks more like the system one than the one in the image you posted; you're free to use it if you like.
Find icons and icon finder is great resource to find different UI icon and graphics for apps
I want to create a inside building map with multiple levels (building floors), directions (navigation), coordinates and statical locations (elevators, escalators, emergency exits, etc) but I don't know what software can I use for that.
Also I want to include this map on a iPhone app so other users can see it and interact with it. I don't know if it's possible to use Google Maps API to doing that.
I could use a image in Illustrator or Dreamweaver to create a image map, but I think that isn't a good option to update data (layout changes often).
Thank you very much!!!
I'll answer the question I asked three years ago, as this can help other StackOverflow users seeking answers to the same question.
Currently there are several tools that can be used to create indoor maps for iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps.
There are two tools that IMHO are the best options, and they have different approaches, as follows:
https://www.indooratlas.com/ - Indoor atlas detects variations to magnetic fields inside buildings to better identifies user's position. You can use smartphones (iPhone and Android) to sense and record these magnetic variations and to map indoor locations.
http://indoo.rs/ - Using iBeacons you can develop indoor maps and guide users with routes inside small our large buildings like malls, universities, museums, etc.
Both tools have APIs that you can use on your apps.
Firstly you need to decide how you want to deliver it. You indicate that it's not just on an iPhone and given it's a building map it probably changes a lot. So I'd be suggesting you look into doing it as a web site. If you go that way there are a whole range of technologies that you can employ to construct a web site. But basically there are two pieces you would need to research and consider. That being the technologies you want to employ on the web server to generate the site, and the technologies you want to use on the client (browser) to view the site.
I'd suggest searching for other similar sites and looking at how they do them. This can tell you two things - what works and what doesn't work.
Lastly you need to consider your strengths, what programming languages do you know? Is it practical for you to learn new languages and technologies for this? What's your budget like? Can you afford to contract the work? etc.
i'm looking to query the itunes appstore charts to determine what position a given app holds.
this would need to go as deep as possible with a view to tracking an apps movement from launch to appearing in the top 100 and further.
any ideas?
You can get the top 200 apps, podcasts, etc. from the iTunes RSS feeds:
http://itunes.apple.com/rss
edit: The iTunes RSS feeds now limit you to the top 200. Up until a week ago it would return the top 400
There are plenty of sites out there that do this, but they all operate via some flavor of screen scraping. Apple has no API for this, and I doubt they ever will.
The app store data is in XML format. You can use any number of parsers — click on the search field in the top-right corner of the Stack Overflow page and type "iphone xml parse", for example, for questions about how to parse XML on an iPhone.
Apple will likely reject your application if you use it to scrape the Apple sites directly as it violates their Terms and User Agreement. If you want to do an app like this, I suggest setting up your own service that scrapes Apple, then use the iPhone app to connect to your own servers.
As mentioned below there are plenty of good ways to grab the data. See here and here
If you're interested in checking whether an app is being featured on the App Store homepage a category homepage, in What's new, What's hot or Staff picks, you might wanna have a look at a script I wrote:
http://www.futuretap.com/blog/scraping-app-store-featured-entries/
This will give you the top fifty songs:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topsongs/limit=50/json