I am in the process of developing a printing application for iPhone. Printing happens through
a dedicated remote server, I just need to send the to be printed documents to this server.
I am facing problems in accessing the documents spread across various apps. I have registered for a good number of file-types. With this approach, only apps which have implemented document interaction will show my app in their "open-in" option (ex safari, mail). But what about rest of the files in apps which do not implement the document interaction controller ? (like photos in the default photos app, documents in iBooks etc)
This limitation seriously hinders the purpose of my app.
What is the best way to let every body (I mean every app having printable documents in the device) know that my app is capable of handling print requests ? How to I hook into their action sheets etc ?
Thats simply not possible, you can't hook into other apps from within your sandbox and you can't get out of it unless you don't want to be in the App Store. All you can do is to write the creators of these Apps a nice mail and encourage them to use the UIDocumentInteractionController, in case of Apple the address would be bugreport.apple.com
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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 need to implement a message service into my app that works exactly like this:
users register with a nickname within the app
they can add contacts (just nicknames) and send them a message by just specifying their nickname
they can send a message whenever they want, and the message is stored on a server until when the receiver connects to internet.
when a message is received, a push notification is triggered.
So, the messages work pretty much like emails, however instead of using email addresses, we only use usernames. I'm also going to build my own back-end for it.
Which APIs should I use or which 3rd party framework can I use ?
And any tip ?
N.B. I need to make it work with iOS 3.0 as well.
and in the future I will develop an Android app, so the nicknames should be unique and I should be able to send messages from iPhone to Android devices within the same app.
thanks
I've successfully used the Three20 library and would recommend giving it a try. It's an open source spin-off originated by the author of the Facebook app. It features a bunch of additional GUI components that might be useful to your project, like a message composer that resembles the one used by Apple's email app.
Also, Three20 features a nice framework for handling navigation within your app. Currently, the biggest drawback seems to be that certain features don't play well with the iPad API.
The answer seems to be Push Notifications
I'm new to mac/iOS development. I'm thinking of to develop a UI less application by using existing Apps/Libraries.
I want to know whether following things will be possible to make or not, it will be great if someone provides me some insight.
Here are my questions:
Is it possible to show/hook additional buttons on existing contacts
-> contacts view (some additional buttons under FaceTime button)?
Is it possible to route some messages to SMS inbox? where the user
feels like he received/sent the real SMS?
In short: no.
In somewhat longer: iOS applications run in a sandbox that rather severely limits their ability to interact with the outside world. This is for the purpose of protecting the user's security and experience using the device. It MIGHT be possible to accomplish both of those things if you were running on a jailbroken device and using non-public APIS (though frankly I doubt you'd be able to add buttons to the existing contacts list by any means at all). But such an app couldn't be sold in Apple's app store.
It is possible to store some application files and share it with another application?
Can application A remove files created in such shared space by application B?
In general, no. There are a few things you can consider.
All apps can read/write/share photos via the user's photos library.
Some apps have been known to share data via the address book. That is, they put data in a special address card which can be read by multiple apps.
If the apps have matching App ID bundle seeds, they can access the same keychain entries. I'm not sure how much data can be stored in the keychain, but it is possible to share data this way.
Apps can pass data to each other via a launch URL. That is, one app can ask iOS to open a URL that launches the next app, and that URL can have parameters that pass data.
No, each application has its own sandbox. Only way to communicate is to use custom URLs to call the other application or have a 'middle man' (eg a computer).
As an alternative to RupertP's answer, the only real work-around is to use a globally-accessible server. A lot of iOS devs use MobileMe's iDisk (not free) or DropBox (free for a limited account).
i want to create a application which sync my iPhone contacts to my server and vice-versa.
i read a article on google Get Google Sync on your phone . i want to this type of feature which directly update the contact without user interaction (however one time setting is desired).
any body have idea how the google sync work .
Please advice me that how can i achieve this task. any suggestion and link is greatly appreciated
I think it's important to separate the two overlapping approaches in your question.
Firstly, Google Sync is essentially a way to use Microsoft Exchange protocols and to setup a Mail / Contact / Calendar profile on an iPhone. The iPhone OS supports this feature, not an iPhone App in the App Store. Google Sync leverages this fundamental capability of the phone by exposing the data (mail, contacts, calendars) via these known protocols. If you want to expose data in this way to your users, setup a Microsoft Exchange server and ask questions on serverfault.
Secondly, there are iPhone apps. iPhone apps sold in the app store are not currently allowed to run in the background. This means you can't emulate functionality like iTunes or Mail where your music plays while you are browsing the web, or mail checking is done while you are playing a game of Mini Squadron. If you want this backgrounding capability, file a bug/enhancement with Apple.. However, you can interact with iPhone contacts (Address Book) via the API.. You can also of course "re-invent the wheel" and expose the data however you like via the internet, and consume that data from a custom iPhone App with the one caveat that users would need to actively launch your application to get to this data and it would not be integrated with the built-in iPhone Calendar, Address Book or Mail applications. Some good examples of that are some of the music community apps that have messaging systems built into them. Presumably that is all being done with web services.
EDIT: It is also worth mentioning that should you go the "iPhone App" route, you should at least consider if push notifications are right for you, and if so how you will handle it.
Have you seen the API-Docs?
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/ContactData/Conceptual/AddressBookProgrammingGuideforiPhone/100-Introduction/Introduction.html
Next there is an application I use called Funambol - it is a sync4j Server/Client. They have an open source application to sync contacts on the iPhone. Source is somewhere in their repository, informations here: http://forge.ow2.org/scm/?group_id=96
As slf told you your application must run in foreground. This may limit you.
Good luck & best regards,
Florian
The 3.0 SDK will allow your application to read contact data on the phone.
Web services will allow you to publish that data to your server, and receive updates.
You may also want to use coredata to store a hash of all contact data so you can tell what is new / updated and just send that data to your server.