I'm currently making a small app for a business that just wants users to be able to view their coupons on their app instead of the fliers.
Since I am new at iPhone development I was just wondering how to do this. Right now I just have pictures of the coupons that are in the project. If I want to add new coupons however I would have to change the source code and then change the version.
Will I have to update the application every time I add new coupons? Or is there a way I can dynamically do it without the user having to update the application.
Thanks for any help/ideas.
You will want to store and update your coupons in the cloud (your own server, etc.) and define a RESTful interface to it. Then your app will download the up-to-date list of (active) coupons when the user opens it. You might want to use a library such as RestKit to avoid having to write the low-level Objective-C http code.
The user would be forced to update the app every time you add new coupons.
If you had the coupon images on a server, and load the coupons from there every time the app loads, then the user wouldn't need to update the app. You could simply keep putting more coupon images into your server.
Or an easy way to implement this would be to create a UIWebView and point it to a website where you can constantly loop the coupon images and the user would never know that they were looking at a webview.
Related
Basically what I want to do I be able to enter in data on a website, and have it appear on an iPhone app, so I want it to send the data to my iPhone, and store it so that every time i open the app, it will re load the data and put it on the screen. How can I go about this?
You will need a backend-side to your app. If you don't have any experience with backend-developing, I would recommend taking a look at Parse.com or other similar backend providers. They give you a server-solution without having to develop it yourself.
Good luck, and welcome to SO!
I'm facing this problem while designing my iOS app. Suppose that a user purchases an app and downloads it to the iPhone. I would like to provide him with a default consumable item the first time he runs the app to use whenever he wants , however I would also like to track if the user has already consumed the item. This way if he decides to reinstall the app we can restore the transactions (if he used the item) or we can avoid possible intents to download different kind of content by reinstalling app and consuming default items each time. (Guess NSUserDefaults is not an option here).
One approach that came to my mind was using UDID(or any iOS 6 alternatives) to keep a record on server of the user's device the moment he uses the default item. But this will limit items just to the device from which they consumed content.
It would be great to support all the user's devices (like inAppPurchases), but I can't figure out a way to implement this.
Any suggestions or help would be great.
Thanks a lot.
In order to tie information to a user (not just a device she used at one time), you'll need to ask the user to identify herself and save it someplace other than the device. In other words, a backend that implements registration and login.
From scratch, this can be a lot of effort that an iOS developer didn't count on. Fortunately, there are several services in the world that provide a substantial head start. Here's a nice round-up. I've had direct experience only with Parse.com, and think it's excellent.
I'd like to create a framework to advertise my other apps in an app. I think I can simply create a UIButton placed in main menu screen or home view to lead users to an UIView which contains our other app's info. However, in that way, if I want to update or add new other apps in the UIView, I need to create a new version for the app.
I need an approach that I can update the other app list whenever I want.
Thanks for reading!
setup a webservice that will return a random one out of a list or the latest one etc + a url to an image online. that way the app will remain the same and its only the backend that needs to be updated
I've been developing an application for our client and they are requesting that we add in compulsory updates for their application. The app allows sales-team members to showcase their product and they are worried that if a product gets re-called then the sales-team must reflect this in the app immediately or else there could be legal implications for the company. How feasible is this to implement? Are there any examples of this in use?
Cheers for the help guys,
Dan
The way you could do this is to get the app to call the server and ask for the latest version number. If it's different then stop the app and tell the user to upgrade. However, this won't work if they start the app without a network connection :)
I also don't know if this will be allowed by Apple?
A better way to do it is for the app to download a list of products each time it runs (cahcing it incse it starts with no connection of course!) so that the products in the app are always up to date and the users never need to upgrade at all.
In the home page of my iphone app, there is a button added. When that button is clicked some other iphone app needs to be opened in a new viewcontroller (with out closing the parent app).There will be a back button on this view controller. When the back button is clicked, the new viewcontroller which is showing the another app needs to be closed and our parent app's home page needs to be shown.
Please give me some ideas on how to do this. I googled for this i didnt get any solutions.
Thanks,
Raja.
-- the following applies to iOS versions previous than 4.0 :)
Actually, there can be only one iPhone application running at once (with exceptions of Safari, Phone and some other system applications). The iPhone Human Interface Guidelines say so:
Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.
However, if you only need to e.g. show a webpage, you can do it using UIWebView
Also, if you need to open another application, you should use URLs as pointed by Steve Harrison. This will, however, close your application. The recommended behavior in this case is to remember your application state and restore it when the application is run again, as Nithin writes.
According to apples documentation, they are not allowing any applications to be run in the background, except system generated ones. So you will be unable to do the thing you are going to implement. However, there is one thing that can make the same result.
You told that you are calling other application to run on a button click. Before initiating that application, save the current state of your application, may be using sqlite3 or core-data, and then open the other one. While returning back, load the pre-saved data from the database or wherever you have stored it. Every time you start the application, you check for the persisted data, if exists, load it or otherwise load your basic view
I don't think that you can run other iPhone apps within your own one. It doesn't make sense. You can open another iPhone app via a URL (see here and here), but this will close your app.
Like it has been stated: running two apps is not allowed by apple. You can however implement this apps features into you're app and have both get and save data to the same server...
Or like Nithin said: this functionality is available on JB iphones. Look into "backgrounder" for implementing one solution for normal users and one for thouse that has jailbroken.