I am building a web browser for iPhone in Xcode and the "home page" of my app is a speed dial page which provide 6 slots for users to add their favorite website. Each slot will then display a screenshot of the website. So what I want to do here is to grab the screenshot from the link input by users, for example, "http://www.google.com". Is it possible to do this with cocoa touch?
In case anyone want to have a similar function like this, I did find a way to do it but not sure whether it's the best way of doing it. Or maybe now there are libraries or plugins out there that provide this function already.
My solution
After users have entered a website url, you need to create a temporary UIWebView and load the url (do not make it visible to the users). After the UIWebView finished loading, you make the UIWebView visible and then take a screenshot, after that, make the UIWebView invisible again immediately (or simply destroy it). In this case, you will get the screenshot of that website and users won't notice what just happened.
Related
Short version
Is there a way to force a specific banner to show so I can take a screenshot? I know I can Photoshop it etc, but that's not really nice.
The whole thing
In name of an intermediary firm I regularly place banners for their clients on my site via DFP (my account). They always request a screenshot of the site displaying the clients' banner to pass on to them showing that I've started the campaign.
Unfortunately sometimes the frequency is so low that even "As fast as possible" takes a ton of pageviews before the banner shows up (which is also not really nice towards the other advertisers).
You can check documentation for Preview a creative
In short:
You need to open creative, click Preview tab, click on site and put url of the page on your site where you expect to see your creative
Update
Looks like problem related to way you are opening creative. I have reproduced this behaviour.
If you open creative directly trough search it shows no On site link
If you open line item first and from this screen navigate to very same creative, you will see On site link
Okay so for this page:
http://www.facebook.com/ESPN?sk=app_224097940938597
Which appears on the left hand bar between ESPN Fanwhich and ESPN Live Chat.
That isn't a canvas but it isn't a static page that I can gather. I found this tutorial: http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/how-to-add-a-custom-tab-to-a-facebook-fan-page/
But that is creating static content.
What I'm wondering is how I can create a dynamic page within a tab?
To create a "dynamic" page within a tab is pretty easy. Install the Developer's App and create a new application. There are tons of posts all over google about creating new Facebook apps, so you should be able to find those pretty easily.
After you create a new application, you set up the Tab information for it under "Facebook Integration."
The way tabs work is they create an iFrame in the Facebook canvas that loads a page from your webserver. You can do whatever you want within that iframe to make a dynamic page. Also, since it's an iframe, you can have links that go all over the place and build a whole mini-site which works inside the Facebook canvas.
Basically, you do the same thing you would normally do to create a dynamic page/site, and set up a Facebook application that points to it. There are a few caveats to building Facebook applications, but they're hard to enumerate without specific scenarios. The biggest one (and it's well documented) is that the size of a tab is 520px wide, so whatever you build has to fit within that width. The length can be whatever you want, Facebook has APIs in place that let you automatically resize the iframe as needed.
Good luck, and welcome to Facebook programming. Prepare to rip your hair out, because everything changes every 4-6 weeks :x
My iPhone app has a home screen, with icons to various sections of the app. One of them opens a webview containing a simple tumblr blog. I'd like to be able to display the blog's "last updated" date underneath the icon. Not a super complex request...any ideas on doing this simply and easily?
Thanks!
Do you update the tumblr blog through the UIWebView or through a web service from your app? If from your app, then you know when the update was done and can store it in user defaults or some other place, and use that in a UILabel. If its from the web, then you wont know because it will have happened without any side effects to let you know of the update. If that is the case, you might see if there is a web service that lets you fetch the last update time and use that web service to get it and update your label that way.
Maybe this is a stupid question and I did not understand exactly how Facebook applications work but here it goes
I want to implement a small e-shop as a Facebook application and for the products to have like button. The application will be instaled on a business page.
The problem is that the link for the like post on the wall will be to the actual eshop not to the facebook application on the business page.(or is it possible to make it to the application (eg. when you click the browser goes to the business page, selects the eshop tab, opens the product)?)
So actually I need to make a eshop site with 2 templates one for outside view and one for IFrame facebook view.
Is it possible to detect (from code-behind not in javascript) If the request is from the iframe or directly from outside?
Or the solution is more simple.. create a small version of the shop for browsing products only to be viewed in facebook and a full shop for outside view and the only relation between them is that when you click the like post from the first one you go to the second one?
I think I have found a solution...
I have created 2 domains that point to the eshop
shop.domainname & facebook.shop.domainname.
And in code behind I can check the Request.Url.Host if it starts with facebook.
For the facebook app the canvas url will be with facebook.shop.domainname and the links from the like button will be for the shop.domainname.
In this way I should be able to use 2 templates for the site and detect witch one I shoul use....
in titanium, i'm using the webview to display a wordpress blog page, that is already formatted for mobile browser. instead of writing my own interface, this works as a good work around. the apps sole focus isn't the browser.
but my issue lies, when the user clicks a link outside of the initial displayed domain. i only want the main domain to be displayed in the apps browser. if any other link is clicked, that takes the user outside of that domain, i want to have it open in the phones default browser.
can anyone point me in a direction for this. i tried adding a listener to try and catch link clicks, however, i've been unsuccessful.
thanks
in this blog posting I show how to find links in a webpage and change the link behavior. Using the same method, you can intercept the links and redirect to opening the URL in the devices default browser
One solution would be to catch the onclick() Event by Javascript inside the WebView (your blog code) and handle this by a custom handler. Maybe you can inject the javascript event handler code into the running WebView through Titanium.
Another solution is to make your blogposts readable for app technology and create a new data interface. This is the way I would do. For that I would use some kind of JSON data format and a simple REST Interface to get the data.
I don't think bove solutions are that simple. If you want an app with "great feeling", you'll have to handle the events by your own. Maybe Phonegap would be a better solution four your problem. But there you will still need a kind of REST/JSON interface for your blog data. The idea behind an app is, that the main code is in your app and you get the content from a remote source. This way you'll get an advantage compared to a simple browser optimized site.