I'm reading many things about Local Notifications and the way they can help to update the app badge number.
I'd like to update this badge at midnight, and set its value to a number I can't know before midnight. So I'd like, if possible, to launch a function at midnight that would update/load some datas, check the number to display, and display it on the badge.
Of course, the number to display is not relative to the displayed number, and can be lower or greater.
This is expected to work :
- When app is in background
- When app is in foreground
- When app is not launched
would you know a way to do this, even partially ? If not possible, let say I can make things to know the badge number before midnight... Would this help you for a working answer ? This is not wanted, but if I don't have the choice to make this work, I'll plan to write tons of useless code to do this...
Unless your application fits into one of the "official" multitasking cases (VOIP, location, and background audio), the only way you're going to be able to dynamically set the badge number when your application isn't running is with push notifications... applications can't run code in response to a local notification (until the user presses the "View" button in the notification popup, at least).
See this document for everything you could ever want to know about local and push notifications in iOS.
You can't reliably ensure that your local app will run when it needs to unless you register it as a VoIP app or as requiring continuous location monitoring; either of these, in an app that's not in fact used for VoIP or navigation, will almost certainly result in an App Store rejection.
Your best bet is to send the badge as a push notification. Assuming that a server you control can know what the badge number is supposed to be, it can send a notification with just that badge value—not necessarily an alert popup or sound—to your app. Urban Airship is a good, simple way to send push notifications without having to do a lot of configuration and setup.
You very well may be able to do this. Look at the Apple Guide to running code in the background.
Related
Since few days i am searching for the functionality which will allow me keep user posted that application is running in background. I have attached a !image for what exactly i am looking for. i tried googling but could not get exactly what I need. when i tap on the flashing red bar it takes me back to the application.
Thanks in advance.
The red banner you pictured is provided by the system, is shown only if your application uses background audio recording (see AVAudioSession), and doesn't provide the opportunity for you to choose what happens when the user taps it.
Unless your app fits into one of a few specific classes, it doesn't actually "run" while in the background. Instead, it's "suspended" -- still in memory, but gets no CPU time. What happens outside of your app is thus up to the system, not to you... the only way to show a banner that will launch your application is to use a push notification service or UILocalNotification, but those banners are only shown briefly, and you don't get to control their duration. What you seem to be specifically asking for isn't possible using public API.
The kind of notification you want isn't supported by the current iOS for third-party developers.
If you want that kind of functionality then implement Apple Push Notification service through
this you can first give message to Apple push notification service. then Apple service
automatically generate notification for your App as you want.
My question has to do with what happens when the user ignores multiple local notification. In my testing, it appears that iOS 5.1 (perhaps earlier too) passes only the last ignored notification to the app and discards all of the previous ignored notifications.
With my app (and I'm sure many others out there) the user may not launch the app with every notification and thus the possibility exists that there may be several unacknowledged notifications before the user launches the app. The reason this is important to me is that I am trying to place an accurate badge on one of my apps tabs to reflect the number of fired but not yet acknowledged notifications.
Has anyone solved this problem? Apple's phone app keeps an accurate badge for missed calls, but of course they have more capabilities than we do. Unless I have to, I don't want to resort to changing from an numeric badge to something else like an exclamation point.
Regards,
-- John
I'm working on an alarm/reminder application and want to show a custom alarm view when specified time is reached.
From what I understand, there are various (real and hypothetic) ways of doing it:
UILocalNotification. It would be perfect, but alert customization features are insufficient, e.g. I can't show a custom alert view, I can't play a sound for more than 30sec etc.
Keep application in the background and use NSTimer or other means to schedule execution after some time. Most likely won't work as the app may be killed any time.
Start my app at specified time to receive the notification. As far as I know it's not allowed at all.
After spending several days searching for a solution, I would give up and stick with UILocalNotification, but I DO know an app that shows custom alert view at specific time AND is available in AppStore. The app is named "Alarmed" and from what it looks like (last app view shown on alarm time before an actual alert; alarm still triggers even after the device is restarted) they found a way to start their app at specific time and still pass Apple's review.
Any ideas how this can be done?
Thanks.
It's not possible to show notifications other than what UILocalNotification offers you, unless the app is running in the foreground. (I just tried to install "Alarmed" and it uses a regular UILocalNotification like you'd expect).
Look at this app for example.
How does this work behind the scenes?
I know you can set the badge by using:
[UIApplication sharedApplication].applicationIconBadgeNumber = somenumber;
However, this would need to work in the background for it to be able to stay updated. However, there's a 10-minute restriction for backgrounded apps. I'm thinking it has something to do with push notifications, but I don't know how that would work exactly.
Any ideas?
I'm setting a bounty on this. If possible, I would like a detailed step-by-step process of how to set up my webserver to handle these push notifications.
APNS (Apple Push Notification Services) has an option of showing a notification with just a badge (no alert, no sound). You can specify it in the payload. That is how the badge can be updated.
You can have a server send out the message to the user or use local notifications. But since you want to get the user's weather information, I guess a message from the server would be the way to go.
You can also specify that the app uses background services to get updated location and use this location to get the weather info.
Here are a few good references. Once you get the hang of it, its actually pretty easy rolling out your own server/client
http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/07/10/how-to-build-an-apple-push-notification-provider-server-tutorial/
http://code.google.com/p/apns-php/
http://www.easyapns.com/
The 73 here, is normally how you'd see the amount of messages related to the app there are waiting for you.
I assume you can set & reset that number, so they just push an update to you, saying you have 73 in-app messages waiting for you, and they abuse that mechanism to display the tempreature in farenheit.
You're correct, they're doing it through APNS (Apple PUSH Notification Service). It's pretty complicated to set up, but google "iphone APNS" and you'll find much better guides than what I could whip up off the top of my head. Here's the one I used to get out service working. It does a good job of walking through the process step by step.
Once you get it set up, you'll want to pass along a "badge" count with your APNS notification. The documentation for how to do that is here.
My app should post some message to Twitter at the end of each day at the time X. App might not be running at this time X, but it still has to post that message. I don't want to bother user by everyday asking to do this task.
Can I use Push Notification to silently (without any alert view popup, sound or anything else) do some task in my app in some constant time everyday even if it's not running?
thx
There are three 'notification' mechanisms you can send via push: alerts, sounds, and badge values. The way the push notification works is that on the phone it launches the app and hands over the 'push payload' to it with those values. Even if you turn off all three mechanisms, the OS will still have to launch your app each time, which means the user will get interrupted.
In short, you can't have a push happen silently. I doubt, from a user-experience point of view that Apple will allow things to happen on the phone without the user getting notified somehow.
No.
You can't schedule things to be run by your app on a non-jailbroken iPhone.
The only solution is to have a separately hosted service somewhere to which you push details from your app and that runs the scheduled updates on your behalf.
To do so silently is not up to you. The iPhone device has a configuration in which each app with a Push mechanism has settings where one can specify if they want alerts or not. If set to yes, the text of the alert is displayed as well.
sounds like you are trying to "wake up" your app at a specific time each day to perform some type of task. from what i understand about the iPhone this is not possible. you cannot create a cron job or something that will fire on a time you specify. you can run this on the server side and then push a notification to the user telling them that the message has been posted to twitter.
if you are on a jailbroken phone i feel confident that there is some way to do this.
Given that push notification requires that your server send a notification, why not skip a step and have the server just send the update directly to Twitter on the user's behalf? You can't use push notification to trigger an automatic task on the iPhone like you're asking - the user must take the step of accepting the notification for anything to happen.
if you really want to do it from the phone, you can just declare a "long term" background task should be covered around here (iphone app programing guide) some where..., that way you never go sleep, and you can do what ever you like... :)