I have a daily quote that I post on my wordpress blog each and every day. I want to make an iOS app for my subscribers so that they can get the daily quote on their mobile devices and also be able to save their favorites, etc.
Originally, my plan was to use the RSS feed of the wordpress blog. However, I don't really like the way this would work. I would rather be able to send the quote directly from my computer (or iPhone) and have it be "pushed" to my users. Right now my blog has over 450 posts. I want my users to have access to all past posts, and it seems like a slow way of going to have my RSS feed set to show that many posts.
I don't have any experience in this sort of thing. All my developer experience is in game dev and I could really use some help figuring this out. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
There's a sample project for getting and reading and RSS feed. That would be a good place to start. Once you understand the basics of iOS programming and design, then you could considering using the APNS (Apple Push Notification Services). That feature (fairly complex) allows you to push your quote on screen. But if you quote is too long, that might not make any sense.
But your first step is to get your feet wet and get up to speed with iOS development. Give yourself a few weeks for that at least.
Related
I'm planning on creative a Facebook app for a college project but I'm unsure as to how to go about specifics.
I have been working within flash (animation, general AS3.0 coding) for close to three years so I'm pretty comfortable working within this program. I have looked up a lot of information about using the Facebook SDK for ActionScript etc. but I'm really not sure what I'm doing in relation to this.
Is it possible to create an entire game within Flash CS6 and then add any necessary PHP additions (for posting to timelines etc.) afterwards?
Sorry for not having a clue but any help would be extremely welcome!
You can get some examples from
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/
Thanks
Dhiraj
If you just want to post data from the game to Facebook - for example, a simple "I scored [score] points!" message on the user's wall - then you should not need to write any code outside of your Flash game, other than making sure that the page it's on is set up correctly (with Facebook tags and JavaScript, etc.).
I found this post helpful in showing the basics of using the AS3 API to log in and pull data from Facebook into Flash: http://permadi.com/blog/2011/02/using-facebook-graph-api-in-flash-as3-1-5/.
what are the advantages and disadvantages in using Flurry or Localytics?
I can't answer about iOS, but the Android libraries for Flurry had a very half-baked feel to them when I tried them out about 3 months ago. There's a lot less power in their stats reporting and drilling down through the data can be like pulling teeth.
Additionally, I was getting wildly inaccurate session counts in a small closed beta test of my app (1000 sessions reported in a few minutes from one device). When I contacted Flurry support, it took them nearly a week to get back to me and then all I got was a fairly useless stock response. That alone knocked them straight off my list of potential analytics providers.
I've used Localytics on Android for hundreds of thousands of total installs at this point and am quite happy. Android gets treated as a first-class citizen (rather than feeling like a bolt-on on Flurry or even Google Analytics), and they have a pretty nice looking UI with a lot of good drilldown controls.
Both services are free and both services provide the same basic functionality of providing app analytics (e.g. number of users, type of devices, how the users are interacting with the app, etc.).
I have used both services for Android, although I am currently using Localytics because the Localytics library is open source. The Flurry library is closed source. Open source has the advantage that you can modify the library, as well as see exactly what the library is collecting.
Using flurry in your app you can trace your app, Suppose you want to track that this button pressed how many times ,You can use flurry it shows that in this location this app is used and that button is pressed that number of times.
DISADVantage:- Flurry is very slow it gives you results in 14-15 hours.
ADVANTAGE:- it is free
OTHER :- in place of flurry you can use google analytics(free) and omniture(Paid but give result faster)
you have to register yourself in flurry.com
Both of them store the data in public area. Although the data is so-called privacy, but it's not on your own server.
Flurry is free but provides much less detailed information, and flurry also only accepts up to 10 parameters per event. Localytics makes it easy to sort your data in many ways. For example I can look at all my users for the past week, now I can view users per day, or per hour. Then I can split the data to show me which users that played in the last week started playing the game for the first time, and then I can view that chart scaled to 100%. I could then add a filter so that I'm only looking at data from the users that started on a specific date, or specific week, or even multiple specific dates/weeks/etc. There are only a few things that I'd like from the localytics website that they don't provide, like retention data for days 8-13, or 15-27, or past 28 days, but those things can all be done through SQL queries.
Basically, flurry is free, but basic compared to what you get from localytics. Localytics I believe is free up until 10k MAU (monthly active users). Using localytics over flurry has made a huge difference on the product I'm on, we have been able to make much better decisions based on data.
Like for websites we have Alexa.com which show site analytics of the site and its rankings, etc.
Is there something similar for iPhone Apps?
Basically I want to know how successful an App is. I know we can guage it by seeing number of user reviews but at times there are not enough reviews and it becomes difficult to guage the success of that app.
We use appannie.com for our tracking... it's quite good.
All the datas are on your iTunesConnect account. However those datas are not always very clear. If you want nice charts, aggregation of reviews and rankings and several other stats about your applications, there are a lot of softwares that aggregates those datas.
I am using Prismo for instance, but there are several other applications that do the same thing (even web apps).
Localytics is good..
Is there currently a way to read GameCenter leaderboard data from the Web?
I'm looking for a read only way to display a leaderboard on a companion website. I do not need to post scores or otherwise manipulate the leaderboard off the device.
I have a feeling the answer is going to be no and I'll need to use OpenFeint's because they have a JSON API available.
I have been trying to find an answer to this as well.
I came across an interesting article Game Center via Openfeint
that discusses using Openfeint and Gamecenter together by using the new Openfeint SDK
Then using their JSON API publish results to the supporting website. I cant see any other way around it and feel this is what we need to do. Not the nicest, but you do end up with a game that sits in both communities.
Hope it helps.
If you are the author of the app and your web host provides PHP and MySQL you could roll your own server-side script to process score submissions and another script to generate a dynamic HTML page to display the scores in any way you like. Many web hosts offer PHP and MySQL for free.
There is no ready made solution that I am aware of.
To be honest I don't think there is much to gain from doing this, since players already have access to the leaderboard from within the game, and visitors to a website might not care about high-scores of a game they haven't played. Thats just my opinion.
i'm looking to query the itunes appstore charts to determine what position a given app holds.
this would need to go as deep as possible with a view to tracking an apps movement from launch to appearing in the top 100 and further.
any ideas?
You can get the top 200 apps, podcasts, etc. from the iTunes RSS feeds:
http://itunes.apple.com/rss
edit: The iTunes RSS feeds now limit you to the top 200. Up until a week ago it would return the top 400
There are plenty of sites out there that do this, but they all operate via some flavor of screen scraping. Apple has no API for this, and I doubt they ever will.
The app store data is in XML format. You can use any number of parsers — click on the search field in the top-right corner of the Stack Overflow page and type "iphone xml parse", for example, for questions about how to parse XML on an iPhone.
Apple will likely reject your application if you use it to scrape the Apple sites directly as it violates their Terms and User Agreement. If you want to do an app like this, I suggest setting up your own service that scrapes Apple, then use the iPhone app to connect to your own servers.
As mentioned below there are plenty of good ways to grab the data. See here and here
If you're interested in checking whether an app is being featured on the App Store homepage a category homepage, in What's new, What's hot or Staff picks, you might wanna have a look at a script I wrote:
http://www.futuretap.com/blog/scraping-app-store-featured-entries/
This will give you the top fifty songs:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topsongs/limit=50/json