I'm planning on creative a Facebook app for a college project but I'm unsure as to how to go about specifics.
I have been working within flash (animation, general AS3.0 coding) for close to three years so I'm pretty comfortable working within this program. I have looked up a lot of information about using the Facebook SDK for ActionScript etc. but I'm really not sure what I'm doing in relation to this.
Is it possible to create an entire game within Flash CS6 and then add any necessary PHP additions (for posting to timelines etc.) afterwards?
Sorry for not having a clue but any help would be extremely welcome!
You can get some examples from
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/
Thanks
Dhiraj
If you just want to post data from the game to Facebook - for example, a simple "I scored [score] points!" message on the user's wall - then you should not need to write any code outside of your Flash game, other than making sure that the page it's on is set up correctly (with Facebook tags and JavaScript, etc.).
I found this post helpful in showing the basics of using the AS3 API to log in and pull data from Facebook into Flash: http://permadi.com/blog/2011/02/using-facebook-graph-api-in-flash-as3-1-5/.
I'm planning to implement some app that performs similar functions as some website does. An app should be able to post, get and view some data. Most viewing data is available only after login. Payments. The webservices are .NET asmx XML services.
So, I'm planning to use UIKit, drag and drop some text fiels. For posting the data, I will do some manual input validation, assemble input into a string, post it to the server. Also, some parsing will be done after getting info form a webserver. Now, I haven't done any website app before, so I'm just curious what are the potencial problems that I might run into.
I guess you are asking about potential technical issues. The ones I faced recently working on an app of this type and workarounds are:
Maintaining your session with the server if you are combining native UI screens together with UIWebView's of your website.
XML Parsing can be hairy at times, so JSON is the best option depending on your preference. The other solution is to output XML in the PLIST format which is easier to code against. On the server side PHP has some PLIST generating libraries. Am not aware of what is available on .NET.
On the iOS side the ASIHTTP library helps make it easier to post to websites, particularly when you are using binaries etc.
Depending on your use case you may also consider a pure web based UI version which resides inside a UI webview. If you are planning on going this route JQueryMobile is a pretty good solution for rendering iOS like UIs. This saves you quite a lot of effort on the communicating with the webservice and parsing etc.
Thats all I can think of for now.
Biggest problem might be getting it approved by Apple if they think it should be just a website and not an app. They might cite: "Limited Functionality". see : https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html
I can also reccomend www.sudzc.com
Your UI will certainly not be as responsive as a native app.
Your users won't be able to use your app without an Internet connection/flaky connection
You'll have to rebuild all native controllers yourself if you wan't your app to look like a native iPhone app.
You'll have to rely on libraries like PhoneGap to use most of the hardware/non HTML supported functions (like geolocation, camera, etc.)
Etc.
We have an iPhone app that can display an image dataset and pass it to an UIImageviewer - however we could do with a rough pointer. If the user was sent the dataset (image) via email as an attachment how could we pass that onto the app to be displayed. These are not regular jpeg/png/bmp images - more datasets which need to go through / use a set of libraries to be displayed.
You can launch an application if that application registers its own URL scheme. However, I'm not sure how you would embed your own scheme into an email attachment.
http://mobileorchard.com/apple-approved-iphone-inter-process-communication/
http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html
On a related note, I've noticed that you have been asking a lot of questions regarding DICOMs and iOS devices, trying to develop your own app, because you have a particular (email-centric) workflow not supported by existing PACS. It seems like you've already developed your own app, so congratulations are in order. If at any time, you decide that it may be more trouble than its worth, feel free to check out ours.
http://nephosct.com
Currently we bootstrap off of OsiriX as our server, but that should be fixed when we release a platform independent version (hopefully within a week). We would also be happy to work with you to add features to the app so that it supports your daily workflow.
During the development of my iPhone app, I decided to integrate Google Maps by including a UIWebView with a URL I construct pointing to maps.google.com. The problem is that the website tries to get the user's location, displaying the "This app wants to use your location". This creates a number of issues for me, which I can explain if necessary.
Is there any way to disable the UIWebView / Mobile Safari from asking for the user's location. The only workaround I can think of is to use Google's Javascript v3 API to make my own map, but I would have to get a license and I'm not 100% certain I would be able to disable asking for location (although I think I can).
Does anyone have an alternate workaround or way of tackling this issue? Thanks!
I believe I found a suitable workaround for now. I remembered that you can embed maps from Google in your website using an iframe. I checked the url they construct to do this and noticed they appended an extra parameter, "output=embed". I appended the "output" variable in the url and pasted this into Mobile Safari on the simulator and it no longer asks me for my location.
The only drawback of this is that I can see so far is that there are some extra UI components on the page as it includes both the mobile controls and website embed controls on the page. Also, I have not tested this on an actual device yet.
Edit: Testing on the device showed that the embed controls don't work, but the mobile controls work as does every other aspect of the map.
Use an MKMapView instead.
(I'm assuming there's a reason you're not using MKMapView for this task and you're stuck with the UIWebView)
You might try asking for user location earlier in your application via CLLocationManager, i.e. right after launch. The permission alert will not be shown more than once. (whether the user chooses to allow or not, which you do not seem to care about)
Not entirely sure that this will work in your case though, UIWebView may still prompt for permission to share location data with the websites it shows.
Assuming it's done via JavaScript, you could try injecting some javascript in - (void)webViewDidStartLoad:(UIWebView *)webView using -[UIWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:] (e.g. you could set the location-requesting function to null). I'm not entirely sure how well that works while the page is still loading, though...
iPhone OS 3.0 is being announced and previewed next week (March 17).
We all know the feature set users want. Copy/paste, MMS, Flash on iPhone, etc.
We'll see about those.
What I'm interested in what does the development community feel the SDK is missing, in need of, to make programming for the platform easier and more productive.
A more complete Interface Builder with support for custom palettes and all sorts of goodies like that.
Better control over the keyboard.
Better unit testing support. (Unit testing can be done, but only on the simulator, and it's very awkward to set up.)
Push notifications. Please.
A more accurate simulator, i.e. one with a more accurate set of frameworks.
The ability to easily build views like the Mail compose window.
For that matter, an in-application compose window.
A better way for apps to share data locally than by invoking URLs.
Access to the calendar, notes, mail (possibly read-only), and bookmarks (again, read-only) databases. Maybe even limited access to the iPod database—even just the ability to read song metadata and access and change the playing song would be helpful.
Some sort of middle ground between UILabel and UIWebView that allows for formatted text without a huge hassle.
More built-in toolbar icons.
The return of the "glass" button style that was in the beta SDK.
A few useful internal views, like UIProgressHUD, exposed.
And last but not least...
A pony.
An easy Javascript bookmarklet installation method for Mobile Safari. (OpenRadar: 1, 2)
UIWebView needs more of UIScrollView's properties and methods, such as contentOffset.
More configurability on some of the built-in behaviors and views, e.g. the button text on UITableViewCell's "Delete" button, or the styles and text of UIAlertSheet/UIAlertView buttons. (Some of these can be done today with undocumented calls, but I'd rather not rely on those.)
More flexibility from UINavigationController, such as the ability to push/pop views that selectively don't display the navigation bar but using the same animations and stack, or more customizability over the navigation bar button labels and behaviors.
The ability to restrict interface orientation per UIViewController, not just accept/reject changes via shouldAutorotate. E.g. I want my main content view to be autorotatable, but I want my navigation hierarchy and settings screens to always display in portrait, even if the content view was rotated to landscape.
libxml and its handy DOM XML parser instead of the SAX-based NSXMLParser.
libcurl w/SSL, or more options and functionality for NSURLConnection.
Ability to check whether a URL scheme is registered. This could be used for apps to detect whether other specific apps are installed, and enable functionality selectively, e.g. when Instapaper detects Tweetie is installed, it can offer a "Post with Tweetie" button. (Disclaimer: That was a plug. I make Instapaper.)
I'm sure I'll think of more, but overall, I'm very happy developing for the iPhone. I'm amazed at the quality and sophistication of the iPhone OS, the SDK, and the development tools given how incredibly young they all are.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned garbage collection yet. Objective-C 2.0 on the Mac supports optional garbage collection. I don't really see any reason it wouldn't work just fine on the iPhone as well and it would eliminate much of the tedium of having to explicitly release objects all over the place.
What I'm hoping most for is to allow iPhones to talk to each other either via Bluetooth or some other means. Granted, they can talk via Bonjour if they are on the same Wi-Fi network, but that's just not convenient enough in 2009. If I'm out with a friend and want to play a multi-player game we first have to find a Starbucks or whatever the heck to get on the same Wi-Fi network. Also, think of the ridiculous amount of social apps you could have if iPhones could talk to each other without needing Wi-Fi. Exchange business cards, flirt with the cute girl over there, etc.
Form a PURE programmers perspective, make XCode as helpful of an IDE as Eclipse or IntelliJ are in the Java world. There's so much time I waste on stupid stuff that the IDE could have found for me as I typed it.
I also don't understand why I can't color buttons without having to use images.
Better multitasking is absolutely key at this point. Android's got it, Palm's WebOS has it - both, it seems, in largely unrestricted and well-implemented fashion. Possibilities:
Push notifications with a good UI (message stack in addition to badging/sound/whatever - if they have to have an extra approval step so apps can't be obnoxious, so be it)
Multiple full processes (not possible with current OS, I realize, but then I've never seen a good explanation why the iPhone doesn't support virtual memory)
Smaller "background" versions of apps that can run in the background - no GUI and a significantly tighter memory constraint
A good mapping API. Let us access the Google Maps abstraction that the Maps application uses !
More Interface Builder goodness
Better simulator
Smart inbox. Incoming messages are routed to installed handlers based on type.
Synchronisation framework that simplifies syncing with desktop & Mobile Me.
Decent landscape support, without the multitude of bugs, especially for the camera picker. Better support for rotation and more control of it.
Access to EXIF data on images from the picker, so we can tell their location
Deeper access to the camera API, so that we are not rail-roaded into the standard photo taker / picker
Push notifications that can launch an application. (In lieu of full multi-tasking, which I don't think we'll get and which could be problematic.)
Better, more intuitive keyboard controls.
API for inter-application messaging.
Access to data from Calendar, iTunes, Mail, Notes and more (with user's permission)
A more accurate simulator, with, for example, ways to limit bandwidth, and use the Mac's camera to actually take a photo.
Phone-phone bluetooth for data exchange
Access to more of the views used by iPhone apps, e.g. the progress HUD, email "blobbing" mechanism for email addresses, thumbnail scrollers, HUD brought up in Photos app, and more.
Less sandboxing. It won't likely happen, but it would always be appreciated for an app to have slightly more power than they currently do (actual filesystem access, for example. even if it was read-only access, it would still allow for more interesting applications to exist).
EDIT: Also, access to the copy/paste API. But I hope that one is obvious to Apple.
My list:
More full-featured IB support as the Mac has
Inter-app Data transfer mechanism (could be C&P, but does not have to be)
Greatly improved camera API with deeper level of control and more flexibility
SDK access to bluetooth and more support for protocols
Real ObjectiveC framework around the address book like the Mac has today.
Warnings similar to the location warning when an app tries to access address book data.
I'm sure whatever they actually have prepared, there will be a few interesting twists.
Ability to send SMS messages without having to have launch the SMS client and have the user type the message.
Access to the raw camera data so that things can be done without having to take a picture and wait for it to save (like you can do with Android)
push notification so that you can launch tasks... would need to be user controllable.
A camera that can focus (I know... have to wait for the next iPhone for that... if they decide to put it in...)
A UIKit level drawing api.
We all know the feature set people want. Copy/Paste, MMS, Flash on iPhone, etc.
I would have thought those specific items were down the SO wish list (although it seems I'm wrong looking at the votes on this comment :-).
MMS is a pretty pointless app when you have eMail. Flash is not an OS issue - Flash could be delivered today.
I don't even want push notifications - they're just a patch, I want background apps. I also want fixes for all the broken APIs like Camera, video and landscape support. Support for CoreImage filters would be nice too but probably too much to wish for.
[[ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook] me] for being able to use the owner's Zip code, phone number, or whatever.
Ability to download files to local storage and sync them back to iTunes or your hard drive
Get EXIF data from photos
Pull all photos at once
Pull all contacts at once
Control screen brightness
Access to music in iPod section
Read access to email and text messages
Access to Safari cookies (so maybe I could make some kind of keep-me-logged-in app.)
fix table view in landscape mode
new camera API with direct access to the camera
distribution code signing automatically when uploading to the app store (instead of code signing in xcode)
ability to request more memory so users don't have to reboot their phones to get rid of background apps
A non-Mac based development envionment.