is there a way of obtaining cover art for a soundtrack? My app can provide the artist and sound track, but the different cover websites I have been looking through offer no convenient way of obtaining it. Is there a class available maybe?
Thank you
Edit: I am streaming music, the tracks are not in the devce's music library.
If you can get the title of the soundtrack album, I suggest that you try using the Discogs.com API (http://www.discogs.com/help/api). Even though it is mostly a user-driven database and the quality of some cover art is not great, should be a good place to start. The API works by giving you results for simple queries using any information you may have about the album, and then you can pick which results are better suited.
I found a combination of MusicBrainz and Amazon give good results - MusicBrainz for the searching and identification by album/artist name, and Amazon for the cover art (MusicBrainz provides the ASIN to link between the two). More work, but more accuracy in my experience.
If the track isn't in the media library, then you can't use the media player API to get the information you need. You'll need to use a third-party service. Gracenote (owner of the CDDB) provide such a service, however I have no idea what they charge and whether it's any good.
have a look at MPMediaItem and iPod Library Access Programming Guide
hope it helps
Related
Hi guys I'm looking for a solution to that enable a user compare a image to a previously store image. For example, i take a picture on my iPhone of a chair and then it will compare to a locally store image, if the similarity is reasonable then it confirms the image and calls another action.
Most solutions I've been able to find require cloud processing on third party servers(Visioniq, moodstocks, kooaba etc). Is this because the iPhone doesn't have sufficient processing power to complete this task?
A small reference library will be stored on the device and referenced when needed.
Users will be able to index their own pictures for recognition.
Is there any such solution that anyone has heard of? My searches have only shown cloud solutions from the above mentioned BaaS providers.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Regards,
Frank
Try using OpenCV library in iOS
OpenCV
You can try using FlannBasedMatcher to match images. Documentation and code is available here You can see "Feature Matching FLANN" here.
What would be the easiest way to graph a line graph on a iOS app? I am building a iOS app that needs a line graph I don't need anything complex just something that will graph a int.
I have seen core graph but not sure if thats the way to go.
You're probably thinking of core-plot, which would be a fine solution if you want something that has a lot of features and is ready out of the box.
If you want something more minimal, you could create your own line graph UIView subclass very easily and make it do exactly what you want. Building a general-purpose graph library is a lot of work because there are so many ways that people like to vary their graphs. If you know exactly what you want and don't need something more flexible, rolling your own can be a quick and effective solution.
If you do decide to roll your own, Matt Gallagher's Cocoa With Love blog has a number of very good graphics entries to get you started.
Apple's Accelerometer sample app (on their iOS Developer Center web site) includes some example code for a simple line graph.
Nuclios http://www.infragistics.com/products/ios/ is a pre-built library that has a bunch of graphing styles. It's not free but I don't think the license fee is outrageous either ~$250
You could take a look at BEMSimpleLineGraph.
It's modeled after UITableView and offers a wide range of features.
I would like to download information from wikipedia to my iOS app. Firstly, I created simple RSS reader, but I can't download date from wiki. Now, I think that I should create parser for wiki.
What do you think about this? Any ideas?
Thanks,
Tomek
In my opinion, parsing a website is never a good idea. Only the smallest change in the design of the website can break your application and make it unusable. I'd try to get to your data in an alternative way. ;-)
Sandro Meier
Scrapping a web site directly from your app is never a good idea. If you are ever going to do that it is suggested that you do it on a server and provide the data to your app in a well known format, so that site changes can be quickly managed by your server, and as a result, never breaking your app.
Although wikipedia does not have a formal API, it provides some other ways of extracting data from its servers. You should check this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot#APIs%5Ffor%5Fbots
I know this question is quite old. But I've dealt with the same problem and wrote this very small library. I am using the mediawiki api (Mentioned in the post from Felipe) to get the needed information.
https://github.com/prine/WikiApiObjectiveC
I need to implement cover flow in our iphone app. Our app need to display images from server. We already have webservice to return list of pictures. Number of pictures will grow over time to 1000s of pictures.
Here I need your help to decide which library is good for my situation without any memory issues. and any experiences you have in similar scenario.
I appreciate any input you can give in my scenario
Here is list of libraries in mind.
tapkul
OpenFlow
FlowCover
Please help deciding which library to use and
I can't help on the issue of which library is best to use, but be aware apps have been rejected in the past for doing including cover-flow like features.
If you really must include cover-flow functionality, I'd recommend you write a little test app with each of the available libraries and see which fits your requirements the best. You might also try memory profiling the different solutions and see which consumes the least resources.
There probably isn't a "one size fits all" answer to this question, as everyone's requirements will be slightly different.
I am interested in extending my website to provide a service which involves users "check in" in my university's campus. Since Location Based Services (LBS) is pretty new, and there are not much literature around that could provide relevant interests to this matter, I have the following questions to ask:
First, I know that I have to design an Android App and possibly an phone app application. For all I am guessing, foursquare is simply using the client to send data to their webserver back and forth.
What are the standard protocols for the client to communicate with the webserver? (or is it simply just json or xml?)
What kind of special web service do they use on their backend? (Like some research would reveal they are using LIFT, written in Scala which is something that I am not familiar with.).
I know python pretty well. Are there webservers, i.e. django or pylons, that provide similar service to 2) above?
How difficult is this really?
Also, any literature on this subject matter is greatly appreciated.
Use the foursquare API.
They have pre-made libraries for both Django and Python here, those should make it easier to integrate foursquare into your website.
Well, I do think a good first step would be to look at Foursquare's API, both to see if you can simply integrate with their service (i.e. look for check-ins that are to campus buildings or whatever) or just to get a picture of what they're using. Their API seems like a pretty standard web service using XML or JSON, which seems like a good practice for you as well.
There are some challenges in building a scalable web service that will handle geographic data: you'd want a database that can handle geospatial indexing for you (otherwise the algorithms can get a little complex). If you're familiar with Django, GeoDjango might be a good fit for you. I hear that Foursquare is actually switching to use MongoDB, which has some geospatial indexing features: they're likely using a NoSQL database because of their unique scaling issues which you probably don't need to worry about.
Mimicking foursquare isn't a good approach. A solution to your specific functionality needs and load levels will always be custom, not copied. Even the biggest university campus in the world, with every single person using the service, you'd be totally dwarfed by foursquare's user base. So whatever they're doing is WAY higher-end than what you need.
For your purposes, a simple web service is probably more than adequate. I'm building apps that are location-sensitive (arts/cultural events and consumer offers local to the user's current position) right now that hit PHP scripts with query string or posted-data arguments, and consume JSON. Nothing fancy, but I can handle the load on the server side with lightweight technologies I already know, and I know it'll scale to meet my actual load.
Don't be beholden to the way somebody else does it, even if they are the industry leader. Their needs aren't your needs.