Let's say we have a mobile app (iPhone, Android) already deployed and being used by people.
Is it possible to change text on buttons, title bars, or even shape or colour of these things without a major update? What I mean is, do we have to deploy an update to the whole app (for example, new version) in order to change one single text on the button? Or maybe these things (settings) can be stored in some kind of database or XML?
Help me out on this one please. Thanks a million.
Is it possible to change text on buttons, title bars, or even shape or colour of these things without a major update?
No. You have to deploy a new version, even if you want to change a single thing like that.
It's possible to do changes to an existing app without deploying a new version, but in your case it's not possible. This is how it works:
You create a mechanism to check for new updates.
New updates can be new data, new settings, etc.
You make your app download and use that new data.
The problem here is that you have to have already deployed an app that do the steps above. Since your app currently does not have that implemented, there's no way to do any changes to it but updating it.
You have to update your app. I implemented the consumption of a JSON string recently to display a Message of the Day periodically. It also keeps a "low watermark" that I compare against the user's running version. If their version is too old I present them with 2 options: upgrade or quit.
You could as easily make your text work in the same way. Just be sure to keep a local cache in case they don't have network access. Will require some healthy refactoring.
you are able to store the text of buttons in values/Strings.xml and set them to the controls by text="#String/text_for_buttonxy" . This is grat for multiple languages, because you are able to put the Strings.xml in a country-code ending value folder like values-de values-en or values-fr in order to get the right String based on the phonesettungs.
Vor colors you are able to to the same thing with the colors.xml.
But you won't be able to change this xml file by synchronisation with a server, this will be a litte bit more complicated, please explain how to you want to change the settings.
Related
I have one project that I have to sell to another clients, so I wanna found a way to unify the code to, when I release some updates, I have to manipulate only one code (and, of course, keeping the specificities from each one)
I found an article HERE which the guy creates a new folder named 'config' and set some variables there to be used in the parent project. I tried this but find out that would be very tough to do because the first app was developed specifically by one client, and with it I would need so much time to make all the aspects dynamic... Another problem is firebase, in first app I used firebase but in the second i won't. How to make it possible?
And in this article they say about 'flavours' that can be used to do something similar.
Someone knows about this approaches or there is another to reach my goal? With flavours I will have less re-factor than with config?
I appreciate any help
A third way to do this with no client specific app configuration is to make an api call to get back your client specific theme, and then set the flutter theme based on this.
If you need web support see below:
First update your assets in index.html that aren't white labeled, leaving stubs in their place that we'll fill in later. i.e.
Next show a nice loading indicator while flutter loads. To do this, just put the html for it in the body element of the index.html file.
Finally update the webpage title and favicon using javascript inside Flutter. I used package
universal_html: 2.0.8
https://pub.dev/packages/universal_html
then you can update the favicon
import 'package:universal_html/html.dart';
var favicon = document.getElementById('favicon');
favicon?.setAttribute('href','insertLinkToYourImage');
Updating the title can be accomplished in various normal ways like just setting the title attribute of a MaterialApp widget.
I will start the development of a new facebook app to replace an old one. I can create a new one and start from zero... or can I replace the code of the old one and change its name, to keep the users? It sounds weird to me, but could I?
Is there any consequence of changing the name of the app? Can I keep my users if I change the name?
Thanks!
The app name is purely for display purposes – changing it does not have any effects apart from what gets displayed to the user in the Auth dialog and other places where your app name gets displayed, f.e. posts made through your app (although for the latter it’ll also influence the displaying of previously made posts – they will show up as made via the new app name when viewed after the change).
to keep the users?
But if you radically change the functionality, maybe you should “start fresh” – I don’t know how much I’d like it as a user when an app I used before now does something completely different …
I'm building an iPhone app that will be branded for several different companies. Each company will get their own app. The code base is the same. Really, the only thing that will be different between them are the app name, app icon, default image, and a few images used inside the app. Is there a best practice to automate this? I am pursuing scripting everything and have some preliminary scripts somewhat working, but it occurred to me there may be a simpler way with Xcode 4.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
You'll need to create a new workspace and add a new project for every own app. You won't need to create all classes for every project. Just create a "core" project with your code base and add his files by reference to the custom projects.
i have same scenario , in which we maintain a global-config File which contain all UI Elements like NavBar , Buttons everything , as we have same layout for all clients , so we maintain a same layout with different color Theme the client choose,.
so for distribution , we change the settings in global file , then add the Client Provision ,& will send for review.
Hope this Helps
I am quite happy with versioning and database migration. I simply have a database of running trails that I add information (more trails) on a regular basis. I want to ship these new trails on version upgrades so the users can have an ever growing list of trails to run. For example i add say 10 trails per month to the app that users who have bought the app need to get when they download the new version.
I was wondering how best to do this and cant find reference to it anywhere. Should you hardcode the adding of new information in say the ApplicationdidfinishLaunching method for example or is there a way to compare databases or not have to rely on hard coding of data which could lead to mistakes.
I could ask the users to delete their app of the phone and reinstall the new one but that is rather cumbersome and the kind of thing microsoft would do.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Willow
AFAIK there's no automation for this kind of task. I do it in this way (in applicationDidFinishLaunching):
compare lastAppVersion value from user defaults
if not set or lastAppVersion == current application version, do nothing
if lastAppVersion != current application version, migrate data from lastAppVersion to current application version
store current application version to lastAppVersion (user defaults)
It can help me to do some stuff within updates if there's no automation for a task.
If it takes longer, I do this in custom splash screen view controller to let user know what's happening or at least to show some progress bar.
We we wondering what are some ways developers have added a help function to their apps. What are some techniques people have used?
One way we were thinking of is to us UIWebView to display a HTML file with help instructions.
Thoughts appreciated.
I'm using UIWebView right now which pretty much contains all the help in a single page, along with some JQuery things to display popups, etc. But I like the way iCab Mobile (et al.) are doing things which is a sectioned UITableView with each row a separate topic or section within their overall help information (complete with icons...) then in their bundle they have each section in its own html file, organized by localization.
Another thing in my queue for the next release is to provide a dynamic "News" view. The rough idea is as follows... I have on my server a file or CGI where I can place small bits of news I'd like to push out to users. On startup, my app checks for network availability and if present, start a thread to see if anything has changed on the server since last updating the News data. If changes present, post an alert letting user know, and asking if they'd like to read it now. At that point, the latest news is already downloaded and cached, so they can simply read it later if they want, and I won't post anymore alerts until the server file changes again. (And one could add a preference/setting to disable these alerts.)
I'm thinking this would be a good way to let people know that some nasty bug is known and fixed and an update is sitting in the queue, solicit beta testers, promote upcoming features or other apps, etc. I can see where constant alerts everytime I've got something new to promote would get annoying, so having a setting to disable them means the user never has to read them unless they want to. Although some kind of override to warn of recently discovered/fixed bugs seems sensible.
FWIW, the author of Mover+/Mover has just started doing a similar thing, though I think Emanuele is perhaps only showing one Notelet at a time, whereas I envision a bit more of a history (shown in UIWebView) until I decide to age stuff off the bottom of the stack.
I'm using a scroll/page view to show several images containing small notes. Each image then tells the user about the more advanced functions on a specific part of the app.
In my opinion the help should only contain information that isn't a 100% relevant for the use of the application. It should be things the advanced user should use to make more use of the app. It should contain gold for the power users. The "basics" should be so obvious that no help would ever be needed. If that's not the case, I think, you've failed as a developer on the iPhone platform.
(Here's a screen shot from my demo app)
I'm currently creating a fairly complicated app. I'm thinking of doing help as a semi-transparent overlay - help in text form is hard to swallow for users; it's much more helpful to just point at stuff and say "this does that".