Using any of the iPhone's private APIs, is it possible to access the call log on the iPhone without jailbreaking it? Is the same somehow possible for opened URLs in Safari and launched apps (which app was launched when and active for what amount of time)?
I know I can't submit it to the AppStore and I don't want to either.
Based on Erica Sadun's DumpFrameworks Perl script I have already created a ruby gem that dumps the header files of iOS's private framework classes. Maybe that's helpful in finding the answer: http://rubygems.org/gems/private-dumper
I'm primarily interested in how to do this (or even just part of this) without jailbreaking but I'm also interested in a jailbreak-based solution.
Thanks!
Johannes
I haven't played with this recently so I'm not sure that these "hacks" will still work but Nicolas Seriot had come out last year with a series of examples that show how much access a developer can have in an iPhone app. He released a project called "SpyPhone" that shows these examples, one of which, I believe, does what you're asking for.
Here are slides from a talk he did on it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/23739469/iPhone-Privacy-from-Nicolas-Seriot
Hope this helps!
Related
Is it possible to incorporate one iPhone app into another in order to redistribute it?
We're going to publish few apps owned by other developers and need to create some pre-rolls with our branding and some other similar features. The original developer could build the app for us, but won't provide us with a source code.
Sorry if the question sounds stupid, we haven't very big experience in the field, just need to clarify some things
Thank you!
No you can't. You are only allowed to execute your own app, you can't embed an other app in your bundle.
It is not possible to embed an app into another app, or better, you could do that, but Apple would reject it and anyway you would not be able to launch it on a non jailbroken device.
More to the point of your specific case, if you have only the binaries you could try and modify the resource files (i.e., .nib and .strings files) to modify the UI to some extent. Of course, you would then need to regenerate the signature for the app (and hope that everything works ok).
It's just a thought, but maybe you could include the other developers apps as static libraries. The advantages would be that the other devs wouldn't have to surrender their sources, you wouldn't face any code signing and bundle id related issues and including static libraries is perfectly safe.
The only disadvantage would be that the devs would still need to deliver the content seperately and they need to learn how to build a static library. An entry point for each app / each library to call it would also be needed, maybe even a small interface to allow the container app to learn about the individual apps status, to cancel them etc.
As I said, this is just an idea, there may be issues with that approach that I do fail to see right now. But maybe others can comment on this...
You might want to check out this link to learn a bit about building static objective c libraries.
Check apples Custom URL scheme, it might find useful for you. Just help=> http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html
I've made some iphone webapps before, using jQTouch and iUI but now i want to try out making a native Apps for iPhone. As i first step i thought of trying to port one of my webapps using Phonegap. So far it works well, but i'm a little concerned about some things in the Apple Review Guidelines and wanted to see if anyone have prior experience and could answer som questions.
2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected
2.6 Apps that read or write data outside its designated container area will be rejected
I'm not really sure what this means. I don't think they concern me but if anyone could give me som more info about it it would be nice.
2.7 Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected
This one is more tricky. Do they consider HTML code? What my app does is to load content into DIV-tags using jQuery.load()-function, that means much of the work in the app is performed on my server. Will it be "safer" if i generate JSON or XML of the data and process it with JavaScript inside the app instead of loading the formated HTML-code?
2.12 Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
This one together with the quote:
If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
Made me wonder what they consider a useful app and what lasting entertainment means. This is my first app and i dont aim for a broad audience, this is mostly a way to get to know the XCode, iPhone-development and the App Store review process before. However, the App will be really useful for me and a bunch of my friends.
2.6 Don't specifically try to access files outside your app's Bundle or Documents directory and you should be fine.
2.7 Somewhere, it explicitly says you can download and use HTML/CSS/Javascript as long as you are running it inside an iOS UIWebView container. But don't try to download, say, Lua source code at runtime and interpret it.
2.12 Don't waste the App store reviewer's time if you are just trying to "get to know" the app development or store distribution process. Read about it instead. Submit something only if you think there are people (not just your Mom) who will really want to download your app and not delete it after trying it out. Maybe at least a dozen to hundred someones. If not, distribute some Ad Hoc deployments to your buddys instead.
This just saves time.
Since I already have a web applciation.
I can just stick it inside a webview.
The question is: Does it turn off many users? How many users will be disgusted that the entire iPhone app is written in WebView?
I think it's pretty safe to say that most iPhone users are expecting apps to use the power of the iPhone, not just be a portal to a mobile website.
Think about facebook mobile compared to iPhone facebook app. If you're an iPhone user, I'm assuming you'd much rather use the app than a mobile version of the site (or mobile version of the site contained in a WebView in a an app).
That being said, depending on your app, if the mobile version of your app is highly usable, it could be okay...
Just my thoughts...
John Gruber on Daring Fireball just wrote about this today.
From a usability perspective, native apps usually feel better. They may also be more responsive and handle large amounts of data more gracefully. I have a few so-called "apps" on my devices which are just glorified Web apps, and they don't necessarily scream quality.
If you've already done your app, then just ship it. But keep your mind open to feedback from your users.
The answer is almost certainly "no". People care far more about the usability and experience of interacting with your application than what API-supplied widget you use to render it.
I read Apple has begun removing apps that are like this. Well technically, they remove apps they think could be easily implemented as a webapp instead. Yours obviously qualifies ;)
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/
EDIT: Apple seems to not mind, according to the Human Interface Guidelines:
If you have a webpage or web application, you might choose to use a web view to implement a simple iPhone application that provides a wrapper for it.
Of course, Apple has a tendency to contradict themselves. ;)
Apple human interface guidelines says this isn't even allowed. I forget where it comes from, but somewhere in the guideline it says apps that are only web views are not allowed. I'm about 95% sure I've seen this. Can anyone confirm?
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I have found the "Getting Started" documents for developing apps on iPhone.
I wanted the community's opinion on what I should know/learn (in terms of languages or concepts)?
How long would it take for a moderate programmer to learn and build an app that manages a list, connects to certain websites, etc?
How to get an app I made onto the iPhone? Just ZIP then install with .ipa file?
I wanted the community's opinion on what I should know/learn (in terms of
languages or concepts)?
You will be using Objective-C and Cocoa. These are fairly strange concepts to crasp if you have not done MAC programming before, but after a short while you will probably fall in love with them. The most important concept to remember with iPhone development is memory management as the device has no concept of garbage collection.
How long would it take for a moderate programmer to learn and build
an app that manages a list, connects
to certain websites, etc?
Not too long. There are a multitude of example applications on the internet, and many helpful folk on stackoverflow.com
How to get an app I made onto the iPhone? Just ZIP then install with
.ipa file?
You will need to download the SDK, create an app using xcode on the mac (or similar environment for windows if there is one) - you can test with simulator without giving apple anything, but in order to legitimately test on device you need to become an apple developer.
However If you jailbreak your device, you will be able to follow one of several methods to get your application on the iphone bypassing apples restrictions.
The whole iPhone UI development (UITableView etc) is based around the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, so a good understanding of that is vital.
Memory management is also vital and can be a little cumbersome to start off with. I have not long started so can not give you a good description here without making a fool of myself :). Apple Memory Management
Finally the development environment can be a little wierd to start off with. Especially hooking up the view controller and interface elements. So check that out.
Then its basically looking through the tutorials on the iPhone developer website and the internet to learn the intracacies of the different UI elements and controllers (tables, textboxes etc).
You will need to pay for the iPhone Developer program to legally use your iPhone to debug your applications (although the Xcode dev environment comes with a simulator). Submitting the application to the app store allows access by everyone. Full details for doing this are available after paying your money. There are other ways you can get apps on the iPhone but I will not provide details for doing that - search the internet.
I would say that looking through the documentation and following tutorials will get you far enough to start building applications. This should not take to long. A good book may also help you out here, try the iPhone Developers Cookbook, which gives good well discussed and broken down examples about specific issues and broader coverage of things like tables etc.
Objective-C. Pay close attention to memory management, i.e., retain, release and autorelease.
Took me about a month (part time) to get something that pretty much worked. And then another month to refactor after learning what I'd done wrong the first time. This was while the NDA was in place so it would probably be easier now.
You need to join the iPhone Developer Program. Installing a development app is just a matter of running from XCode once you have you certificates sorted. (Check the iTunes Connect documentations. It's pretty good.)
Installing on someone elses iPhone is a matter of figuring out ad-hoc deployment (hard) or uploading to iTunes (easy).
First of all: buy a mac if you don't have one already, the windows tooling pipeline is basically non-existant. And trying to run OSX on non-apple harware is illegal in most situations.
Download the iPhone SDK. http://developer.apple.com/iphone/ should have everything you need.
Objective-C is a little bit on the strange side but a moderate programmer should be able to pick it up quite quickly.
Installation: i have no idea sorry...use the app store ;)
Learn objective C and work with Cocoa. There are far more examples of that floating around than iPhone code. Depending on what environment you are used too, Xcode and the experience of developing for the iPHone can be quite a change so get ready to buy some books and spend lots of time scratching your head!
Learn how to navigate Apple's docs.
For example UIView Class Reference.
Took me a little while to get savvy. XCode also has an excellent documentation browser integrated into the IDE. Once you can translate what the docs are telling you into code, the whole API opens up.
Use the Research Assistant in XCode. (Under Help Menu) That thing rocks my world. Highlight a class like ABRecordRef and it will give you a quick synopsis of what it is and how to use it, with links to the reference docs.
The one bad thing about Apple's docs is that they don't have clear examples of how to call a method in the discussion of the method. This is a glaring oversight, IMO. So many time I just wish there was a simple example for how to use something and I wind up going to Google for it.
The above information is quite good, but I'd add that getting familiar with the documentation within XCode is very valuable. This means you need to go to the DOC SETS part of the Developer Documentation window and make sure you have the documentation for the iPhone OS you're coding for. I spent a bunch of time writing code that depended on methods in NSObject that are available in Cocoa but not on the iPhone OS.
I was wondering if I could access the iPhones Core Location framework over a website?
My goal is to build a webapp/website that the iPhone would browse to, then upload its current GPS location. This would be a simple site primary for friends/family so we could locate each other. I can have them manually enter lng/lat but its not the easiest thing to find. If the iPhone could display or upload this automatically it would be great.
I don't own a Mac yet (waiting for the new Mac Book Pro) but would like something a little more automatic right now. Once I have the mac I could download the SDK and build a better version later. For now a webapp version would be great if possible. Thanks.
Why not simply use W3C GeoLocation API available in mobile Safari? This will work on ipod touch as well (suburb precision).
It's literally 10 lines of code and the javascript will work without change on Firefox 3.5. Far easier than scrape some third party website.
http://www.instamapper.com/iphone
iPhone App store
While this may not directly answer your question, there are quite a few iPhone apps that already do this kind of thing with GPS. Instamapper is the first one I pulled up from the app store, but I'm sure you could find something to fit your needs.
I'm pretty sure you can't do what you want directly.
The best idea I can come up with is to "reuse" an iPhone app that records location and makes it accessible on the web. Take Twitter for example. If I'm not mistaken, Tapulous' app Twinkle will grab your location and post it to your Twitter.com user profile. Here's an example of what that looks like:
From your webapp, you could then scrape the user page for each person whose location you're interested in. It's a pain in the butt, but like I said, this is the best I could come up with.
Again, if you don't want to mess with Twitter, there may be other apps out there that do this as well, but I don't personally know of any. Good luck.
We built a really thin iphone client app that simply calls a predefined .js file on our site. Works like a charm.
See arisgames.org for the project.