I am writing an iPhone app, and I have a remote server that will deliver content. I would like to have my app poll the server once per day to see if there is new content, even if it's not running or in the background. I would also like to do this without setting up an APNS. Any advice?
You can't do that, either when your 'not' running or if you are running in the background. The best you could do is to download once per day when your app is first run / pushed to the foreground.
You could use remote notifications to "prompt" the user to bring the app to the foreground so that it could download something?
With the current apple IOS guidelines, that is about the best you can do.
I read that you are trying to avoid using APNS, but I am wondering if you are trying to avoid it for the right reasons, especially when it is designed to efficiently solve the scenario you are describing. I've seen many developers seek alternative solutions to APNS simply because the technology appeared to be complex to use after looking at Apple's documentation. The online documentation does go into a lot of details, right down to the binary protocol level.
But just to be sure you know, there are open-source libraries whose only purpose is to shield you from all these technical details. Some libraries are more complex than others, but some are remarkably user-friendly. If you have not done so already, you might like to take a look at JavaPNS and other similar projects.
I am new to ios development and doing development in ios4.0.1 and xcode 3.2.3. My application should capture other application's launch time and (close) end time. how can we do this? Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
Pushpa
For apps in the app store, the answer is "You can't". The best way to think of other applications on iOS with respect to yours is: don't. You can't access their data, you can't see if they're running, you can't control them, and you can't change them. Apps are well and truly sand-boxed as a fundamental design decision in the current setup.
About the only thing you can do is trigger their launch with a suitably formatted system URL. If a Wikipedia application has registered the scheme wiki, you might be able to launch and communicate some simple data by having the system load the URL wiki://articleName, but that's the limit. You don't even know what application will be launched, only that one has the wiki handler.
Jail-broken iOS systems are a whole different matter, but I'm assuming you're not working on those.
I've got an app I'm building using Appcelerator Titanium that will be a combination alarm clock/url fetcher. The part I'm having problem with is that I need to be able to set a time for the app to go fetch the url and then perform actions as necessary (in this case alert the user if data that should be entered in a time system has been entered). I also want it to do this every day (or every week day) at the prescribed time, and I want it to not have to be 'launched' every time. I'd rather it come up and run as a service, or at least run as a service when sent to the background. I'm most focused on the iPhone, but I've got a few Android users that would like it as well.
Is it even possible to have an Appcelerator app hooked into the system like that? If so, are there any tutorials or examples? I can't even find an alarm clock example, which scares me a bit.
I think that localNotifications should work for you.
there is a sample in the bg.js file included in the kitchenSink.
It is also helpful to know that all of the keys/properties available to you are documented here in the source code.
This guy has a nice alarm module written for android.
https://github.com/benbahrenburg/benCoding.AlarmManager
i wonder what type of application that are allowed to be started in the background/foreground when the iPhone boot , and are they limited to iOS 4 ?
Only Apple apps are allowed at startup, all others must be manually started.
Simple answer: None are allowed to.
I think voip applications. That's what Apple documentation states anyway and yes, they are limited to iOS 4.0. You should declare your application as voip and make according changes in the code. See the link:
Background Execution
Background execution isn't supported by the iOS. Apple takes many steps like this one to prevent the intrusion of their customers rights to privacy. If an app would be able to start on startup, then it would have no problem recording all activity such as GPS, saved files, and keystrokes. Apple doesnt feature, and probably will not feature multiple process handling (more then one third-party process running at once).
I've been doing mobile app development for a long time (2001?), but the systems we worked with back then were dedicated mobile development environments (Symbian, J2ME, BREW). iPhone SDK is a curious hybrid of Mac OS X and Apple's take on mobile (Cocoa Touch).
But it is missing some stuff that other mobile systems have, IMO. Specifically:
Application background processing
SMS/MMS application routing (send an SMS to my application in the background)
API for accessing phone functions/call history/call interception
I realize that Apple has perfectly valid reasons for releasing the SDK the way they did. I am curious what people on SO think the SDK is missing and how would they go about fixing/adding it, were they an Engineering Product Manager at Apple.
The biggest shortcoming in my opinion is support for separating licensing from distribution.
What I mean by this is that it should be possible to download a trial version of an application and later purchase a license for that application (from an API call inside the application or from the app store). This would make it much easier to try-before-you-buy and get rid of the current duplicates of many applications with 'lite' versions.
I think lack of push notifications for apps is the big thing we're missing right now. With push, you can register your application to perform a task (like getting the most recent data from a web service) even when it's not running, at a time and frequency the OS decides is best. In an ideal world, along with the existing concept of iPhone apps loading quickly and resuming where you last left off, this solves the problem of not running in the background. I know some tasks will be more difficult or maybe impossible with this strategy, but it's still a pretty good compromise between third party applications and the iPhone's limited hardware.
Originally push was scheduled for last September, but it was removed from the beta SDK and not spoken of since then.
API's I'm personally looking for:
Apple80211 as a public API (private, current API is fine if documented)
Access to Volume buttons (semi-accessible via Celestial, private, needs new API)
Access to Calendar (private, API status unknown)
Access to Bluetooth + SPP profile (status unknown)
Access to Camera (directly, API status unknown)
Access to JavaScript runtime (directly, not through UIWebView, API status unknown)
WebKit access that's lower-level than UIWebView (private, current API is fine)
Access to Music Library (private, current API is fine)
Garbage Collection.
CoreData is missing.
You've mentioned some of the big ones - copy & paste (or in fact any way for apps to collaborate) is another huge omission.
It also seems to lack a desktop synch framework (at least if it exists I can't find it).
Language independence and especially lack of scripting is another pet peeve - objective-c is all very well but more languages to choose from would be good.
Inability to dynamically extend apps, via scripts or otherwise, is another big omission. This is partly an SDK/OS issue, partly licensing.
My list ordered by priority:
Mapping abstraction (the MapKit looks awesome), but that would require a new Google Maps TOS
Music library
Camera (photo + video) Access to more
UIViews, Apple designed some pretty nice custom ones for their apps
Better UIWebKit abstraction
The features I see missing that it should have is
Access to SMS
Direct Access to Google Maps App. You should be able have access to this so you could extend your application to use the built in features provided by Google Maps.
Access to the Bluetooth functionality of the phone.
Access to the Calendar. Why not allow access to simply post a calendar event for the user.
Access to Active Sync. It would great if we could directly access this and communicate back to the Exchange Server.
Core Image. They provide Core Animation but Core Image is missing. I hope that this is added to the API soon.
These are some of the features that my clients have access for in the past and are supprised when they are not available.
We definitely miss a Calendar API and SMS access. So many applications could leverage such APIs. The iPhone allows users to have everything in their pocket, but it's almost useless as long as developers cannot leverage this integration in their apps.
A language with proper namespaces.
A limitation that bugs me is lack of access to system features that require root or setuid. For example: opening privileged IP ports.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to this, as long as Apple's policy is to keep the device locked-down.
Allow program to set some kind of local timed event for your application to bring up an alert and launch your app if the user agrees (like any calendar app). You could do that with push notifications but there are many cases I'd hate to have to rely on a whole server infrastructure and network connectivity just to basically do some timed thing.
Some idea of what direction the user is facing. I cannot believe the GPS chip the newer iPhones use are not capable of reporting direction.
I would personally love to see
Access to the CoreTelephony Framework (Currently private). Which allows access to all the phone functions (Especially sending MMS / SMS).
Some sort of ability to run stuff in the background. While push notifications is ok for most things, but it is a bit hard to leverage CoreLocation (i.e. have the app show a notification at a certain location). Of course this would probably need an on/off button or app specific like push is.
animation view which will be reduce developer to make a cool app , of course the core business local still need consider more , but the view layer could more easy to use ....