How do I make a phone number recognizable to a smartphone? - iphone

I have a phone number on my contact page and I want it to dial when someone taps it on a smartphone browser, Android and iPhone. Can someone tell me how that's done? Thanks! BTW, I'm using Cufon which is not selectable. Is that a problem here?

Most Android phones will pick up phone-number-looking numbers automatically (sometimes too aggressively - my DroidX insists that all 4-digit numbers are phone numbers, which is rather irritating), but I suppose the cufon might be messing with that.
If you want to be explicit, though, you can use an RFC3966 telephone link, e.g.
<a href="tel:+1-800-275-2273">
Call Apple Customer Support at 1-800-275-2273
</a>.
You can also check out Apple's docs on phone links.

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme to learn what a URI scheme is.
the tel URI scheme seems like what you need, but I have no idea if it really works or is implemented.

You can disable the now native phone number detection by using a simple tag:
Credit: http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-web-apps/phone-number-links/

Related

iPhone displaying random codes on website

I'm unable to figure out why there are random codes being shown in various places on this website. It doesn't happen on other websites. It also doesn't seem to happen on Android devices. It doesn't happen when connected to WiFi. On one iPhone with iOS8 it doesn't have it, but on another it does. On another iPhone with IOS7, it has it. I can't make any sense out of the codes. Any ideas?
See image here: http://i.stack.imgur.com/IdblN.png
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/verizon-wireless-injects-identifiers-link-its-users-to-web-requests/
As your comment suggests you might be seeing a tracking ID from your ISP, AT&T in this case.
Verizon uses the UIDH field which identifies someone to Ad services. It is essentially double-dipping, when the customer is also the product. Not to mention some website receives this header, combines user-provided data with the field, then selling this to someone else... Easiest data-collection strategy of their lives.

How to block PC to visit your mobile site?

I'm trying to block all the PC, laptops and send them to a blank page or any page that I set it up for a PCs site.
I just have a mobile version website and I only want to allow iOS such as iPad, iPod and iPhone to visit my website and block the rest for my security purpose
I'm trying to search in here and google I think I'm using some kind of wrong term or maybe something that I don't know exactly but I see many website does that.
Thanks
I would just scan the user-agent. Find the ones that you will accept and then redirect the rest to a non-blank sorry page. A blank page would not be very nice, so a simple sorry would do. I say this because maybe the user has a mobile device to use, but happens to be on a pc. A blank page would make them think that the site is junk or doesn't work and you might lose their mobile traffic also.
block the rest for my security purpose
How secure does this need to be? You shouldn't trust the client to always tell you the truth about what they are.
I suggest you use some other mechanism to ensure security, for example username/password.
I used MobileESP to detect when someone using a smartphone connects to my website. This uses PHP, and has some functions to make it pretty simple. I'm sure you can accomplish it with the above methods, but in case this would be of some help...
http://blog.mobileesp.com/

iOS: How to initiate a call to an address book contact with special characters (#/*) in the number?

I am currently working on an iOS application that uses live audio streaming, and our users have asked for a feature to automatically block incoming calls when they are streaming. I know that there is no API to do this, so the way we solved it is to have a button on the UI that automatically calls a certain number (specific to the telecom provider) that turns blocking of incoming calls on or off. It does this simply by opening a tel: URL.
This all works fine, and while it may not be very user friendly because it forces users to exit the application, I do belive it's the most elegant solution with the tools provided by the iOS API.
There is one caveat though, some telecom providers do not have a single short number that people can call to turn this feature on or off. They use instead long codes that have special characters in them, such as # and *. Unfortunately iOS refuses to open tel: URLs with those characters, presumably for security reasons. However I was wondering if it is possible for users to put those numbers into contacts and then have iOS call those contacts directly?
I know how to retrieve phone numbers from the address book directly, but that's no use because I will still have the problem of the URLs not getting accepted. So is there instead a way to, say, have tel: URL with a contact ID or something similar?
Thanks for reading and/or replying. :)
You can't dial # or * from an app. It's Apple's scheme to protect us from nasty people.
To quote from Apple's documentation:
To prevent users from maliciously redirecting phone calls or changing
the behavior of a phone or account, the Phone application supports
most, but not all, of the special characters in the tel scheme.
Specifically, if a URL contains the * or # characters, the Phone
application does not attempt to dial the corresponding phone number.
...and converting to ASCII characters and other tricks doesn't work either (I tried).

scan/take picture of check and populate data

Hey, can i scan/take picture of a check and identify the account number and routing number using phonegap on iPhone
Probably not, at least not directly.
You are going to need to look into some opensource ocr software and integrate it into phone gap.

DTMF # and * workaround in iOS4?

I have read all the posts about DTMF and iPhone. I know that the characters "#" and "*" are disallowed by the SDK for security reasons. I have tried the stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: and the FURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes workarounds. It is not possible, in my case, to generate the DTMF tones as one post suggested and even Touch Dial Emoji does not support # and *. I have also used ABPeoplePicker et. al. and have not found a way to use # and *.
Now. Some one on my project swears that he has used an app that directly employs the native dial/phone app in order to use the # and * characters. I can not find any way to do that. I have not found any APIs nor even posts about that.
****NOTE**** if you put a number in the Contacts app with a # or a * it dials out and uses the DTMF commands just fine.
Our app generates a phone number 123 123 1234,,1234#,,1234567*,,123456# internally; so it can't be exploited. Additionally we could used the contacts list to create a formatted number which in theory would satisfy the SDK security desires. But there seems to be no way to use the native dialing app in order to satisfy iOS that we are not being malicious.
Does anyone know if there is a way to directly use the dialing app so that we can use the DTMF commands "#" and "*"?
Thanks much.
Just in case this is still a question for anyone: It is in fact disallowed. Apple shows not sign of changing this despite the fact that all other smartphone platforms allow it. There as some clever approches to getting around this but they all seem to be little better than hacks. I think that t's best to give in on this one and tell people that it's just not possible on iOS.
Altnernatively you can incorporate the creation of a "contact" on the phone, implement your DTMF string into the dial code for the contact.. it will permit * and #.
you can programmatically delete the contact once the call has been completed to "clean up".