Are CFPreferences across iPhone app readable?
In other words, can I write a NSUserDefaults style preference to disk and have it be readable in another iPhone app, if, for example, I didn't write this app, and am working from a static library?
I fear the answer is No. Period. Full stop. Any thoughts?
No. Apps have their own sandbox; you cannot interact between them in the manner you describe. As of iOS4, inter-app communication is quite limited.
One workaround is to use the keychain for storing small amounts of shared data, but there are many limitations to this method. You have to use the same id between applications and that precludes you from using push notifications and other features.
Alternatively, you could support Dropbox or something similar and store the shared information on the internet.
Neither is a great solution.
Related
I love the iPod application on the iPhone, but I wish a had a really simple way of saying "Play this next". Other small additional features could do wonders as well. Is it possible to modify the iPod application or in some way add a feature?
No, you can't. First, Apple doesn't give you access to the source code for the app, which you would need. Also, Apple doesn't provide any api to allow modifications to its apps. You can access data (the songs themselves) so if you really want it to be different, you'll have to write your own app.
It is not possible..Apple only provide you to use data from only few of is own apps..so updating them is out of the question
Is this even possible?
If not I'm really surprised this hasn't been open thru the API yet.
Apple doesn't allow the use of low level network/wifi/cellular api's. Interestinlgy during a previous period, there were apps in the app store that made use of private apis (a few WIFI-Scanners for example). They've all been banded from the appStore by now, as far as I know at least.
Also the newly available (since iOS 4) core telephony framework doesn't offer any methods or properties to serve you the information you're looking for.
So unless you're building a non-app-store-app I don't see a legitimate solution to your problem.
*sam
Several apps in the app store use OS 3 and get signal strength.
Apple fully approves them.
As a developer I'd like to make a few little utilities for myself that use private methods, etc. as I have no intent to submit them to the app store. For instance, at the moment I want to work on an inter-device communication tool (including an iPhone MiFi type implementation).
So the question is, does access to that particular functionality require a jailbroken device? Or are things like that just a matter of using unpublished APIs and such?
It depends on exactly what you need to do. Using unpublished APIs generally doesn't require jailbreaking; you just use the API. On the other hand, if you need root access or want to use privileged ports, then you'll need to jailbreak.
There are two issues. The first is about private APIs - if you use them you don't get on the store, simple as that. I have never heard of jailbreaking being required to use them though.
Then there is distribution. As above, you don't get on the store so you need some other way of loading your apps to devices. If you just need them on devices in your posession and you have less than 100, any developer can do that without jailbreaking. But if you want to send apps to someone remotely, then they would need a jailbroken device.
Not too sure about a MiFi implementation but from what I understand you could make the app do that without jailbreaking. However, if you don't have an active/paid developer account with Apple then you will need to Jailbreak just to load the app on your phone.
Well, based on some class-dump snooping it looks like the Wi-Fi and tethering methods are called on Springboard.app (except for the socks proxy method mentioned by Kristopher Johnson) which requires using the Mobile Substrate libraries and therefore requires Jailbreaking. Boo.
Which of the new features are you looking forward to the most in iPhone SDK 3.0?
Is it one of the main advertised six new things, or something smaller? Something in the "1,000 new APIs", perhaps?
Phone to phone communication via bluetooth seems like it will terribly useful for some apps I am writing. No longer do you have to input all the data you want to store yourself, you can share some of it with other iPhone users.
not really a feature, but the best thing about developing the iPhone SDK further is the great frameworks that arise. there are some really, really great frameworks out there already (like the Three20 project) which will become even better with the new 3.0 SDK.
my real excitement will take over once they let us run background processes. maybe in 4.0?
Video! The ability to write decent tools for mobile video uploads is a big draw.
MapKit by far will bring the biggest change sweeping across the app space.
My personal favorite is that we can finally easily track upload progress of large files (like images).
I really, really want to see fixes in the camera API so that it isn't either broken (2.2.1) or forcing a switch to portrait (3.0).
Apart from that, the most useful features to me are:
push notifications. Great for making an app more sticky - you can let the user know that something of interest to them has happened.
CoreData - I've been using a third-party SQL layer, but it's a little buggy and no longer supported.
Peer-peer bluetooth, as the poster above said, is also useful for local data exchange.
And the least useful? Cut and paste. I actually want to disable it in my app (to discourage people from copying content) - and it doesn't look as though you can (yet).
Bluetooth phone-to-phone communication with GameKit will enable a host of currently impossible applications. Multiplayer games with no WiFi network needed and data exchange between two phones are obvious use-cases.
I'd also like to see - not currently included in the betas - a decent camera API that allowed us to customize the appearance of the capture screen, and as another poster said, have it work properly in landscape and portrait mode.
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 ....