How to localize App Store meta data for Phonegap app on iPhone - iphone

i'm currently wondering how to add more localizations to my PhoneGap App on the App Store. So it is already deployed, and in App Store it shows under Languages, right under the Icon "English, Spanish" but I never changed any configs or so to acheive this. I found in my xCode-project /App_NAME/Resources a en.lproj and es.lproj folder with Localisation.strings.
The standard way I found so far would be to do this.
But for some Reason those folder I create never appear in xCode. What am I doing wrong, and why can't I add more of these ominous XX.lproj-folders?
I'm totally stuck.
I can do javascript localisations for the app itsself but without this app-store languages I can't get my meta-data translated...
Any experience highly appreciated!

the best way is to do it from javascript since you're using PhoneGap.
retrieve the device/userAgent language (or locale, or simply ask the user for a preferred language) and then edit the content accordingly.

If you want to localize app store meta data, your app, or your marketing content there are tools out there now to speed the process such as TraductoPro, which also has built-in human translation ordering services. It even automates or 'macronizes' your code, making the xcode strings localizable. It's a Mac app, simple to use.

Related

Is it possible to embed one iPhone app into another?

Is it possible to incorporate one iPhone app into another in order to redistribute it?
We're going to publish few apps owned by other developers and need to create some pre-rolls with our branding and some other similar features. The original developer could build the app for us, but won't provide us with a source code.
Sorry if the question sounds stupid, we haven't very big experience in the field, just need to clarify some things
Thank you!
No you can't. You are only allowed to execute your own app, you can't embed an other app in your bundle.
It is not possible to embed an app into another app, or better, you could do that, but Apple would reject it and anyway you would not be able to launch it on a non jailbroken device.
More to the point of your specific case, if you have only the binaries you could try and modify the resource files (i.e., .nib and .strings files) to modify the UI to some extent. Of course, you would then need to regenerate the signature for the app (and hope that everything works ok).
It's just a thought, but maybe you could include the other developers apps as static libraries. The advantages would be that the other devs wouldn't have to surrender their sources, you wouldn't face any code signing and bundle id related issues and including static libraries is perfectly safe.
The only disadvantage would be that the devs would still need to deliver the content seperately and they need to learn how to build a static library. An entry point for each app / each library to call it would also be needed, maybe even a small interface to allow the container app to learn about the individual apps status, to cancel them etc.
As I said, this is just an idea, there may be issues with that approach that I do fail to see right now. But maybe others can comment on this...
You might want to check out this link to learn a bit about building static objective c libraries.
Check apples Custom URL scheme, it might find useful for you. Just help=> http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html

Update iPhone app info without going through apple

i was wondering, i have a little experience making iPhone apps but no coding background in anything and was wondering.... Is there a way to update your iPhone app with new text, pictures, colors, links, etc. without manually doing it from Xcode then having to get the new version approved by apple.
I was hoping to be able to update it from possibly from my website. Any easy way to do this? Preferably the easiest solution. Thanks in advance
There is, but you have to design the application to do it from the start. Instead of reading from the app itself, the app reads from a content management system (CMS) or even just a text file stored on your website. Many apps work this way, but you will need to design the app with this in mind.
For the amount of things you need updated, I would create a iPhone optimized version of your website and in your app, all you would need is a web view that takes the user to your website. So to change content, you could just change your website and the user will think that the app is getting updated. One thing to keep in mind though, if the user doesn't have internet connection or if there internet is slow, the site my not show up at all or be very slow to respond and load. Hope this helps.

Create Mobile Apps with Flash for iPhone and Android with Embedded browser

EDIT:
See my answer
I saw some interesting frameworks to build applications for mobile platforms like Android and iPhone with HTML and Javascript so you can use your current web-development skills without learning a new platform language. That's very interesting because you can write just ONE application for many platforms. Very easy to maintain.
But, you cannot sell it in the App stores, so I’m wondering if it is possible to use an embedded webbrowser in the application that loads an external/included html file.
I have seen that it is possible to create Android and iPhone apps with flash, that's is easy, so i want to create a simple 'host' application that only loads content and I can use it over and over again to distribute a new app.
So the question is, is it possible to create a simple app with flash that embeds a webbrowser to load a html file?
When it is possible, next question is, it possible to communicate with the embedded webbrowser? Also a question is, will Apple allow such application in it app store?
I hope my question is understandable.
In a very strict sense, yes, you can make an app that is just a simple WebView wrapper pointing to your web-hosted app.
This is usually frowned upon though in the android market community, and i'm fairly positive such an app won't make it through Apple's closed-doors decision committee.
On the iPhone, if your app only consist of a UIWebView it is very likely that you app is going to be rejected. What you could do is ask your users to bookmark your webapp adding an icon to the home screen. Think Basecamp for iPhone.
After all this time i got the answer.
Phonegap uses a WebView to display the HTML content. It is a compiled native App with embedded WebView.
Apple accepts phonegap generated applications but it still not sure if it made it to the AppStore, it depends on what you doing with it. I think simple apps will made it. See also: http://www.phonegap.com/faq
EDIT/UPDATE:
I tried allot of tools/solutions to create crossplatform apps but all of these seem to do the same thing: It's a executable for the specific platform with an embedded browser. None of them compiles HTML to native code.
Flash (Builder) is something different, it requires AIR (can be compiled into the executable). When you using a WebView (only) with Flash, it is overkill because in fact you do not need AIR to display the HTML in a WebView. I think it is better to use phonegap to 'compile' the executable.

Automatic Update of IPhone App

I am new to iPhone automatic updatability feature where user can change their contents whenever they want and iPhone app should pick them so that one need not to resubmit the application into Apple store. I know that I will need to deal with the database here a lot but if someone could through their idea on the solution design, implementation, and things to be taken care then that would be really helpful to me.
Thanks.
"content" here really means data. Apps can load data over the net to their hearts' content, but they can't load new code. Now, certain data might cause the existing code in the app to do one thing or another, so the app's behavior can be influenced by the data it uses. Don't play too close to the line, though -- if your data is really some form of scripting language that directly drives the behavior of the app, that will likely be deemed unacceptable.
As far as loading the content goes, there are a number of options available. The most common is probably using NSURLConnection asynchronously to load data from a web server. What the app does with the data after that is up to the app designer, and I don't think there's one objectively correct answer to that sort of question.
Apple not only allows this, but presented a session on this data driven app design technique at WWDC 2010, which is available as a video from iTunes to enrolled iOS developers.
Of course, the downloaded "content" can't include executable code, but it can include JavaScript and HTML5 to be run inside UIWebViews, as well as images, sounds, text, databases, etc., which can all be stored for offline use.
This violates apples SDK Agreement and will likely get your app removed from the app store if caught.
It should be mentioned that web apps offer the ultimate in automatic content updates. You can change the content, structure, and features of a web app without ever having to submit your app to Apple or anyone else. Deploying the app is as simple as copying a set of files to your server, and users get the updated version immediately, even if they're currently using the app. Web apps aren't a perfect solution in every case, but their capabilites are compelling if your app is dynamic.

iPhone app that access the Core Location framework over web

I was wondering if I could access the iPhones Core Location framework over a website?
My goal is to build a webapp/website that the iPhone would browse to, then upload its current GPS location. This would be a simple site primary for friends/family so we could locate each other. I can have them manually enter lng/lat but its not the easiest thing to find. If the iPhone could display or upload this automatically it would be great.
I don't own a Mac yet (waiting for the new Mac Book Pro) but would like something a little more automatic right now. Once I have the mac I could download the SDK and build a better version later. For now a webapp version would be great if possible. Thanks.
Why not simply use W3C GeoLocation API available in mobile Safari? This will work on ipod touch as well (suburb precision).
It's literally 10 lines of code and the javascript will work without change on Firefox 3.5. Far easier than scrape some third party website.
http://www.instamapper.com/iphone
iPhone App store
While this may not directly answer your question, there are quite a few iPhone apps that already do this kind of thing with GPS. Instamapper is the first one I pulled up from the app store, but I'm sure you could find something to fit your needs.
I'm pretty sure you can't do what you want directly.
The best idea I can come up with is to "reuse" an iPhone app that records location and makes it accessible on the web. Take Twitter for example. If I'm not mistaken, Tapulous' app Twinkle will grab your location and post it to your Twitter.com user profile. Here's an example of what that looks like:
From your webapp, you could then scrape the user page for each person whose location you're interested in. It's a pain in the butt, but like I said, this is the best I could come up with.
Again, if you don't want to mess with Twitter, there may be other apps out there that do this as well, but I don't personally know of any. Good luck.
We built a really thin iphone client app that simply calls a predefined .js file on our site. Works like a charm.
See arisgames.org for the project.