I will start the development of a new facebook app to replace an old one. I can create a new one and start from zero... or can I replace the code of the old one and change its name, to keep the users? It sounds weird to me, but could I?
Is there any consequence of changing the name of the app? Can I keep my users if I change the name?
Thanks!
The app name is purely for display purposes – changing it does not have any effects apart from what gets displayed to the user in the Auth dialog and other places where your app name gets displayed, f.e. posts made through your app (although for the latter it’ll also influence the displaying of previously made posts – they will show up as made via the new app name when viewed after the change).
to keep the users?
But if you radically change the functionality, maybe you should “start fresh” – I don’t know how much I’d like it as a user when an app I used before now does something completely different …
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I started looking into OwnCloud app development to add some capabilities I would like to my server. To me it seems like Apps can't modify anything like the Login page or User Management page. Is this the case?
I want to build a user registration app and would love to integrate it into the user management page (if not and it has to exist as its own app page not a big deal). The one big problem I see so far is not being able to add a "Register" link to the login page. I could just go in and add it to the source manually, but I would like to keep the App self contained so others can use it too.
If this is not possible to do in an App I may just need to modify the core application and then see if they will accept my feature addition in a pull request.
Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this for me. I don't want to waste my time trying to figure out how to do it with an App on the platform if it wont be doable.
After a lot of digging around I did figure out a way to do this.
In the App's app.php file, you can force a script to be loaded if the plugin is enabled:
$api->addScript('script_name'); // without .js
In that script jQuery can be used to add the elements to the page where you need them.
This was a good solution for me since I only needed to add a single button to the login page. I can see this being a bad idea if you want to make vast modifications. At that point you might as well just create a separate page that you have full control over.
There's a system search in iOS that allows users to search though the whole device by searching entered keyword for app names, mail messages, calendar and etc. Is it possible to provide some additional information (content info) about my app to system search? We are developing some rich-graphic-content app and there are various objects there.
The customer asked us, is it possible to implement such use case: a user enters the name of some object and system search finds that object and shows our app name in the result list :) Maybe it's possible to create some "sitemap" with information about the app content, to put that somewhere into plist and to ask system search to use that for search index. I'm pretty sure it's impossible, just want to be 100% sure :)
UPDATE: One thought on that - maybe system search also uses app description text from itunes? If so then we could place additional information there and to workaround that :)
For static keywords (that are pre-defined when building the app), you can do this: How to get an iPhone app to appear in Spotlight with a query that doesn't exactly match
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to add keywords dynamically, e.g. for the objects/files created with your app, like the Apple-provided apps do. Hopefully, the ability to add your app's contents to Spotlight will be added in a future version of iOS (7+).
Let's say we have a mobile app (iPhone, Android) already deployed and being used by people.
Is it possible to change text on buttons, title bars, or even shape or colour of these things without a major update? What I mean is, do we have to deploy an update to the whole app (for example, new version) in order to change one single text on the button? Or maybe these things (settings) can be stored in some kind of database or XML?
Help me out on this one please. Thanks a million.
Is it possible to change text on buttons, title bars, or even shape or colour of these things without a major update?
No. You have to deploy a new version, even if you want to change a single thing like that.
It's possible to do changes to an existing app without deploying a new version, but in your case it's not possible. This is how it works:
You create a mechanism to check for new updates.
New updates can be new data, new settings, etc.
You make your app download and use that new data.
The problem here is that you have to have already deployed an app that do the steps above. Since your app currently does not have that implemented, there's no way to do any changes to it but updating it.
You have to update your app. I implemented the consumption of a JSON string recently to display a Message of the Day periodically. It also keeps a "low watermark" that I compare against the user's running version. If their version is too old I present them with 2 options: upgrade or quit.
You could as easily make your text work in the same way. Just be sure to keep a local cache in case they don't have network access. Will require some healthy refactoring.
you are able to store the text of buttons in values/Strings.xml and set them to the controls by text="#String/text_for_buttonxy" . This is grat for multiple languages, because you are able to put the Strings.xml in a country-code ending value folder like values-de values-en or values-fr in order to get the right String based on the phonesettungs.
Vor colors you are able to to the same thing with the colors.xml.
But you won't be able to change this xml file by synchronisation with a server, this will be a litte bit more complicated, please explain how to you want to change the settings.
Twitter has an awesome new way to enter "#" and "#" in the latest iPhone app.
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/twitter-for-iphone-ipad-even-better.html
When you type "#" or "#" and then type characters it instantly starts to autocomplete in a table below. How are they doing this? It feels native, but is it?
If it's native, how did they do it? UITextView with an active UITableView? It's really fast and smooth, so I'm guessing they load the phone with trending #'s and your #'s and it's fast because the data is local (it goes to just typing if it's not there).
But I'm wondering if there was a way to achieve this affect with data that is remote on a webserver using async calls.
Any thoughts on how to do this / get started?
If by 'native' you mean, build into the SDK, then I have to disappoint you, this is not a build-in SDK feature (there is something similar with the UISearchController/UISearchBar classes, but that's not what Twitter is leveraging).
This however, does not mean that you cannot build it yourself. I believe it would be quite simple. All you would have to do is monitor every time the user inputs text into the UITextView (this can easily be done using the UITextView delegate methods). You do a check on all the text, and if the user enters an '#' or a '#', or any other symbol you want to watch for, you create/show a UITableView beneath the text view (or wherever you want it).
As for the table view's datasource, it would have to be based on information you gather through search. When Twitter shows you a list of trending tags, etc. I would think it is something they have pulled down when you synced your feed, and then cached somewhere. If you were using a web server, you could do the same. When the user starts entering specific text, you could do a search on the server. If you do the network requests asynchronously, you can display a UIActivityIndicator in the table view, until you've gotten a response from the server. If the user enters more text before the server has 'replied' to you, simply cancel the old server request, and start a new one.
I haven't implemented something like this myself, and I have no knowledge of how it would perform in real-life, but if I was to implement something similar off the top of my head, this would be the aproach I would pursue. It might not suit your case perfectly, but hopefully, it will have given you some inspiration :)
We we wondering what are some ways developers have added a help function to their apps. What are some techniques people have used?
One way we were thinking of is to us UIWebView to display a HTML file with help instructions.
Thoughts appreciated.
I'm using UIWebView right now which pretty much contains all the help in a single page, along with some JQuery things to display popups, etc. But I like the way iCab Mobile (et al.) are doing things which is a sectioned UITableView with each row a separate topic or section within their overall help information (complete with icons...) then in their bundle they have each section in its own html file, organized by localization.
Another thing in my queue for the next release is to provide a dynamic "News" view. The rough idea is as follows... I have on my server a file or CGI where I can place small bits of news I'd like to push out to users. On startup, my app checks for network availability and if present, start a thread to see if anything has changed on the server since last updating the News data. If changes present, post an alert letting user know, and asking if they'd like to read it now. At that point, the latest news is already downloaded and cached, so they can simply read it later if they want, and I won't post anymore alerts until the server file changes again. (And one could add a preference/setting to disable these alerts.)
I'm thinking this would be a good way to let people know that some nasty bug is known and fixed and an update is sitting in the queue, solicit beta testers, promote upcoming features or other apps, etc. I can see where constant alerts everytime I've got something new to promote would get annoying, so having a setting to disable them means the user never has to read them unless they want to. Although some kind of override to warn of recently discovered/fixed bugs seems sensible.
FWIW, the author of Mover+/Mover has just started doing a similar thing, though I think Emanuele is perhaps only showing one Notelet at a time, whereas I envision a bit more of a history (shown in UIWebView) until I decide to age stuff off the bottom of the stack.
I'm using a scroll/page view to show several images containing small notes. Each image then tells the user about the more advanced functions on a specific part of the app.
In my opinion the help should only contain information that isn't a 100% relevant for the use of the application. It should be things the advanced user should use to make more use of the app. It should contain gold for the power users. The "basics" should be so obvious that no help would ever be needed. If that's not the case, I think, you've failed as a developer on the iPhone platform.
(Here's a screen shot from my demo app)
I'm currently creating a fairly complicated app. I'm thinking of doing help as a semi-transparent overlay - help in text form is hard to swallow for users; it's much more helpful to just point at stuff and say "this does that".