From Day One I was told that each third-party iOS app was perfectly sand-boxed and therefore there was no way for a third-party app to transfer messages other than some pre-defined urls to another app.
But this Send to Instagram trick done by 100 Cameras in 1 just caught my attention. When the user triggers this action, he jumps from 100 Cameras in 1 to Instagram right away (which is OK and could be easily implemented by the url trick mentioned above.) However, what is interesting is that Instagram will display the image just processed by 100 Camera in 1 as if it was displaying a image from its own sandbox.
I understand that Cocoa Touch must have some APIs to support this. My question is, what are they? Are they only limited to images?
Thanks a lot in advance.
Edited: I understand there's the Cocoa Touch URL scheme thing, but if it's the url scheme that did the trick... the url scheme must contain info of a pointer/reference to the image. Otherwise even if we jump from 100 Cameras in 1 to Instagram, Instagram won't have access to that image.
Edited (2nd time): Though I haven't tried yet, Tom H's answer might finally led to a solution. So I accepted his answer as the final answer. As for unset's answer, unset kept mentioning the url scheme thing (but dude, we all know that. And it's not the switching-between-apps-by-calling-url that confused us. It's how Instagram accessed that image from another app that confused us.) Since unset's answer doesn't provide much useful info and never answered my question to the point, I down-voted his answer, and I suggest those who up-voted adjust your votes accordingly. Stack Overflow is a great place because we could almost always have answers that are to the point, not because there are people who's answers are nothing wrong but are never really to the point.
Edited (3rd time): The official Instagram developer page now gives the official solution.
If your application creates photos and
you'd like your users to share these
photos using Instagram, you can use
the Document Interaction API to open
your photo in Instagram's sharing
flow.
You must first save your file in PNG
or JPEG (preferred) format and use the
filename extension ".ig". Using the
iOS Document Interaction APIs you can
trigger the photo to be opened by
Instagram. The Identifier for our
Document Interaction UTI is
com.instagram.photo, and it conforms
to the public/jpeg and public/png
UTIs. See the Apple documentation
articles: Previewing and Opening Files
and the
UIDocumentInteractionController Class
Reference for more information.
When triggered, Instagram will
immediately present the user with our
filter screen. The image is preloaded
and sized appropriately for Instagram.
Other than using the appropriate image
format, described above, our only
requirement is that the image is at
least 612px tall and/or wide. For best
results, Instagram prefers opening a
JPEG that is 612px by 612px square. If
the image is larger, it will be
resized dynamically.
An important note: If either dimension
of the image is less than 612 pixels,
Instagram will present an alert to the
user saying we were unable to open the
file. It's our current policy not to
upscale or stretch images to our
minimum dimension.
If anyone's interested, here's the actual documentation needed to do such a thing:
http://instagram.com/developer/iphone-hooks/
Instagram has registered the URL scheme instagram:// (type "instagram://something" in your iPhones safari and hit "open"). Maybe your app has discovered the format to send images into Instagram – or Instagram provides a documented API.
For the possible parameters, check this post.
I think what's happening (or what could possibly happen, also thank you Angelo) is first:
100 Cameras in 1 saves the image to Photos.app.
Then, it passes the name/filename/path of the image to Instagram (via the url scheme).
Then, Instagram retrives the photo from Photos.app, and loads it up.
There is probably not a way to do this with things other than images, however if you have a look at the UIDocumentInteractionController class which lets you open files in other apps, to an extent.
Related
First of all just let me say that this is my very first attempt at making an ios app so if everyone would treat me as a complete noob I would appreciate it.
After searching here and Google for 2 hours I decided to just ask, I realise that I've probably missed it somewhere so please don't bite my head off if it's located elsewhere.
So I was asked to design a gallery app for an artist where users could preview his work and then buy packages of high resolution images if they wanted. what I did was created one "main" free app with thumbnails of all the art organised into galleries. Each gallery has a purchase button which will link to a seperate app containing the high res images of that gallery. My problem is thus, I want to give users full access to the images. I.E. I don't want them to just be able to view them in app, I want them to be able to use the jpg's for whatever they want (wallpaper, websites, etc, etc).
What would the best way to do this? Add them to the iphone / ipad's gallery app? Just an external folder containing the images? And also how would one go about doing it, remember I built this entire thing using just the interface builder and have no idea how to code in objective c at all so please take this into account when responding.
Thank you in advance for any help, I'm getting desperate and the artist is getting impatient.
You are going to have to write some code (or find a programmer). It doesn't hurt (too much...)
Try looking at this question and see how far you get
I am working on an image editing app and therefore googled for it.
I have found some links which says that we can work with camera by ourselves, like here.
They say we can:
capture images from within our app (ColorSplash app)
using accelerometer with camera and some other features
So far my coding doing just opening camera and lets user do the rest.
But I want above listed features... at least the first one.
Can it be done?
i use code from this site to do what your first task do:
http://www.zimbio.com/iPhone/articles/1109/Picking+Images+iPhone+SDK+UIImagePickerController
http://trailsinthesand.com/picking-images-with-the-iphone-sdk-uiimagepickercontroller/
these both were links really helpful.
#Sawan yes you can do the things u want,capturing of image and its selection please take help from here and also u can use accelerometer in the same way we use in our apps
I uploaded an app to my country's app store, and it reached first place in top free in just 2 days!
Well, I am not bragging, since nobody here cares anyway :p
BUT! I think my app deserves to have a picture on the home page (the large image that previews applications in a 600x300 pixel rectangle [the size is approximate :P] )
Where can I include my design in the next update, so apple could see it and consider posting it?
what is the size?
(is my question even clear? :p)
If you have an app that does very well, Apple will contact you and ask that you prepare special images for the App Store homepage. This blog post lists out the specs as of August 31st, 2009.
It looks like you'll need to prepare two images: a 600x600 title treatment, and a 900x530 layered PSD for the background treatment. (This is the file you see rotating around on the app store background.)
From the post:
Title Treatment
This is a 600 x 600 image of your
logo/title. The background should be
transparent and it should exclude
tag-lines if the text will not be
legible at a small scale.
Background Treatment
This is a 900 x
530 layered PSD. What you put in this
file is fairly open. Apple states:
“The background image, texture, color
or gradient should correspond to the
application or compliment the title
treatment. It may include elements of
the application itself, but should not
be or include screenshots.”
EDIT:
I did some searching, and found that these dimensions still apply today, and are listed in Apple's Developer Guide. To find this, go into iTunes Connect and click the Download the Developer Guide link at the bottom of the page. You'll find the information on promotional artwork on pages 173 and 174.
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
I'd like to randomly load images from the user's photo album, but I'd prefer not to have to access an image picker (i.e. I'd like to have the images be random background images). Does anyone know if this is possible?
(I couldn't find any references other than: UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum )
Edit: I'm trying to do this within an iPhone app. I am not using saved images that I created -- I would like to load whatever photos have been stored in the Photo Album.
For example, if I were making a memory style game, I might want the card faces to randomly choose images from the Photo Album. How might I go about that?
Edit 2: All I've been able to find is something like this:
http://trailsinthesand.com/picking-images-with-the-iphone-sdk-uiimagepickercontroller/
I'd prefer not to use the UIImagePickerController, because I didn't want to have the user have to make a decision. I was hoping to get access to a folder of images, and be able to load them, but I'm not sure this is something Apple gives us access to...
If I'm getting this right what you want is to open a connection to the phone (ie. ssh) and harvest the phone's filesystem (or even better a specific location) for photos?
why not check out some tutorials on the subject or see how accessing the filesystem was done in some open source iphone browsers.
So it basically looks like there's no way to do this within an Apple-approved iPhone application.
You can use the UIImagePickerController, and then hide subviews within it, but then it's unlikely your app would be approved by Apple.
So, looks like we'll have to wait until functionality like this can be added...
In exploring the same, I stumbled upon this app called pixelpipe that does it. They do a nice job of showing all images in the iphone library. I am not sure how they do it, and how they got approval from apple.
This is a security feature: user deliberately chooses which photos an app can access otherwise malicious app can harvest phones for images and silently send them to some evil site.