I'm about to implement a web app with pastry kit but I'd like to have it fetching data from a backend hosted on the net.
This backend is reacheable via a Web service... IS there a method in PAstry kit allowing me to call directly a web service and parse response data to update my page ?
Are you aware that PasrtyKit is an Apple project that has not been made publicly available and seems to have only been used by Apple in one project and that all the information and code libraries available have been reversed engineered by people curious as to what is in the package and therefore might change or go away at any moment and has no Apple documentation or support?
Given that the short answer to you question is you will have to google for what is available and then hack it yourself.
You might also want to look at AdLib. It's like Pastry but drives the documentation for the iPad and it might be a bit more accessible as it was built later than Pastry Kit.
Also it is just a guess on my part but i suspect the data sources as they work in DashCode and are reasonably well documented should work in AdLib or PastryKit as Apple would have no reason to change the model.
Related
I'm about to start work on my first app which will be an internal release to gather customer information at a trade show.
I'm hopefully looking into using air for ios or maybe one of the various html/js frameworks to develop this app as an alternative to learning C.
ideally I would do it with some server based php > sql to store and share gathered information between a fleet of iPads, unfortunately due to the population of this trade show there will be no guarantee that i can maintain a wireless connection so need to prepare for these apps all being local access only.
in which case, how would you recommend going about the saving/reading of the stored data, and also how to sync it up with a sql server and then back to the iPads each night.
Did you try PhoneGap? It is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies, in other words it will let you make an iphone app without having to learn C.
People have written tutorials and plugins for storing data locally.
PhoneGap basically wraps a web app hence you can use AJAX for sync with server as and when needed. This article might help.
We explored PhoneGap and found it very useful. and easy too. hope this helps you.
It's the first time I post a question in a blog, but it seems to me this is the best resource on the web for that.
I'm looking for a way to implement audio fingerprinting in an application for iPhone. I had a look at the lastfm fingerprinter, being that I already use other lstfm api calls, but porting it to the iphone seems to be a mess and I'm quiet sure that it would be highly inefficient.
Should I give the search for now as I am looking for a free service ,I'm a young private developer and don't have sufficient economic resources for a payed service. This is also the reason for which I cannot install the library on my web server and run it remotely, sending just the audio data to it. The hosting I rely on dosen't allow me to install third party applications...
Music Brainz seems to be a solution, but not quiet sure on how to obtain the fingerprint...
Any suggestions, hint, tips, links, search queries, anything?
Thanks in advance!
Christian
Check out Echoprint, an open source audio fingerprinting service provided by Echonest.
Here is the iOS example they provide on their echoprint github repo.
Firstly i'm not a programmer but I am managing to work my way through developing my own iphone app for my photography business. I store all of my photographs with a 3rd party who make their API available for public use. I want to implement this API into my app.
I've spoken with the 3rd party and they have written all of the code on a windows based system and although they say its not tied to a windows platform i'm struggling to see or recognise any Objective-C commands within the API and so don't know where to start. They've also told me that its a SOAP based web service.
I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if I should be using the NSURLConnection method? My main desire would be to generate a UITable view of the photo categories I hold with the 3rd party as is the case with their own iphone app, which i should probably say is for members only so wouldn't suit my needs here.
I would really appreciate some assistance with this as i'd hate to have to result to paying a developer to build the app after falling at the last hurdle.
Many thanks
Steve
At a very basic level, SOAP APIs are just a standard HTTP requests against specific webserver that return XML responses. That third party may have a Windows-specific client-side library to speed up the development for some clients, but since you are developing iPhone app, you can't use that library.
You have two options:
- use NSURLConnection and NSXMLParser and directly talk to their webservers and parse the response yourself;
- look for an iPhone SOAP library you can reuse. Since SOAP is an industry standard, there's nothing that prevents anyone from building iPhone-specific libraries. However, I personally am not aware of particular ones.
Hope that helps. It's not the best answer, but at least it might give you an idea what to look for around.
Update: Quick search for "iPhone SOAP library" revealed the wsdl2objc project, though that one is rather old (not updated since 2009). There are other alternatives, listed in the How to access SOAP services from iPhone SO question.
Apple also has a Web Services Core Framework, but there's not much documentation on using it with iPhone.
Look at a sample app code which has soap specific files here:
http://mtgr8-a3.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mtgr8-a3/trunk/nvObjects/soap-specific/
In your posting you have mentioned that the 3rd party provided public APIs. If so, can you provide the wsdl? I can covert it to ObjC with SOAP support for you. I am not using wsdl2objC, but something lot better. If it is public API, you don't have to pay me.
I'm an undergraduate university student who also writes iPhone applications. Next year I'm expected to do a final project, something that lasts the full year and involves a fair bit of software engineering.
My original plan was to write an object-relational wrapper around SQLite for the iPhone (or rather, to massively clean up and extend one I already have) and ultimately release it as open source. Unfortunately, with Core Data being added to iPhone OS 3.0, that's no longer really necessary. (At least, that's how it seems to me; any opinions on this?)
However, I'd still like to do a useful, technically interesting iPhone-related project next year. So here's my question: what do developers need? What sort of problems do you encounter in your apps which seem like they could be handled by some sort of library or framework? My focus is generally more on utility, productivity, and communication apps than games. And since I'm proposing this to a university, something that's either theoretically interesting or attractive to potential students would be preferred. And of course, it'll need to be something that they haven't added to the new version of iPhone OS.
It's in the early stages, but a bunch of scientifically-minded Cocoa developers (headed by Drew McCormack) have joined together to start a BSD-licensed data charting / plotting / visualization framework called Core Plot (mailing list here). This framework is cross-platform between Mac and iPhone, relying on Core Animation for rendering.
While you wouldn't be starting your own project fresh, contributing to this open source framework would be technically challenging and I believe that the framework will have far-reaching applications. I'm sure that the university would be impressed by the potential scientific and educational uses of such a framework.
A library that provides a very simple API that would enable any app to act as an OAuth consumer would be incredible! It could be used to enable data access against hundreds of OAuth-enabled data APIs all over the web, including those of Google, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Flickr, etc. Imagine how many thousands of additional applications you could enable other developers to build with ease.
Your code could be included in pretty much every worthwhile iPhone app that any future developer writes!
I'd like to see a framework that abstracts the interface to various social networking sites. Having a standard API to send updates and post pictures to MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, Blogger, Twitter, and other services would be very useful.
A general purpose framework to communicate with a particular iphone from any application with internet connectivity. iphone apps are great, but so much more can be delivered with serivces from the web - so some sort of communications would be nice.
Make some sort of API that can be used to talk to iphone from other connected applications - either web services or desktop, etc.
I ended up having to go in a different direction due to the rules of the project, but I'll keep these in mind as possibilities for future, non-university work. Thanks, everyone!
I've been doing mobile app development for a long time (2001?), but the systems we worked with back then were dedicated mobile development environments (Symbian, J2ME, BREW). iPhone SDK is a curious hybrid of Mac OS X and Apple's take on mobile (Cocoa Touch).
But it is missing some stuff that other mobile systems have, IMO. Specifically:
Application background processing
SMS/MMS application routing (send an SMS to my application in the background)
API for accessing phone functions/call history/call interception
I realize that Apple has perfectly valid reasons for releasing the SDK the way they did. I am curious what people on SO think the SDK is missing and how would they go about fixing/adding it, were they an Engineering Product Manager at Apple.
The biggest shortcoming in my opinion is support for separating licensing from distribution.
What I mean by this is that it should be possible to download a trial version of an application and later purchase a license for that application (from an API call inside the application or from the app store). This would make it much easier to try-before-you-buy and get rid of the current duplicates of many applications with 'lite' versions.
I think lack of push notifications for apps is the big thing we're missing right now. With push, you can register your application to perform a task (like getting the most recent data from a web service) even when it's not running, at a time and frequency the OS decides is best. In an ideal world, along with the existing concept of iPhone apps loading quickly and resuming where you last left off, this solves the problem of not running in the background. I know some tasks will be more difficult or maybe impossible with this strategy, but it's still a pretty good compromise between third party applications and the iPhone's limited hardware.
Originally push was scheduled for last September, but it was removed from the beta SDK and not spoken of since then.
API's I'm personally looking for:
Apple80211 as a public API (private, current API is fine if documented)
Access to Volume buttons (semi-accessible via Celestial, private, needs new API)
Access to Calendar (private, API status unknown)
Access to Bluetooth + SPP profile (status unknown)
Access to Camera (directly, API status unknown)
Access to JavaScript runtime (directly, not through UIWebView, API status unknown)
WebKit access that's lower-level than UIWebView (private, current API is fine)
Access to Music Library (private, current API is fine)
Garbage Collection.
CoreData is missing.
You've mentioned some of the big ones - copy & paste (or in fact any way for apps to collaborate) is another huge omission.
It also seems to lack a desktop synch framework (at least if it exists I can't find it).
Language independence and especially lack of scripting is another pet peeve - objective-c is all very well but more languages to choose from would be good.
Inability to dynamically extend apps, via scripts or otherwise, is another big omission. This is partly an SDK/OS issue, partly licensing.
My list ordered by priority:
Mapping abstraction (the MapKit looks awesome), but that would require a new Google Maps TOS
Music library
Camera (photo + video) Access to more
UIViews, Apple designed some pretty nice custom ones for their apps
Better UIWebKit abstraction
The features I see missing that it should have is
Access to SMS
Direct Access to Google Maps App. You should be able have access to this so you could extend your application to use the built in features provided by Google Maps.
Access to the Bluetooth functionality of the phone.
Access to the Calendar. Why not allow access to simply post a calendar event for the user.
Access to Active Sync. It would great if we could directly access this and communicate back to the Exchange Server.
Core Image. They provide Core Animation but Core Image is missing. I hope that this is added to the API soon.
These are some of the features that my clients have access for in the past and are supprised when they are not available.
We definitely miss a Calendar API and SMS access. So many applications could leverage such APIs. The iPhone allows users to have everything in their pocket, but it's almost useless as long as developers cannot leverage this integration in their apps.
A language with proper namespaces.
A limitation that bugs me is lack of access to system features that require root or setuid. For example: opening privileged IP ports.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to this, as long as Apple's policy is to keep the device locked-down.
Allow program to set some kind of local timed event for your application to bring up an alert and launch your app if the user agrees (like any calendar app). You could do that with push notifications but there are many cases I'd hate to have to rely on a whole server infrastructure and network connectivity just to basically do some timed thing.
Some idea of what direction the user is facing. I cannot believe the GPS chip the newer iPhones use are not capable of reporting direction.
I would personally love to see
Access to the CoreTelephony Framework (Currently private). Which allows access to all the phone functions (Especially sending MMS / SMS).
Some sort of ability to run stuff in the background. While push notifications is ok for most things, but it is a bit hard to leverage CoreLocation (i.e. have the app show a notification at a certain location). Of course this would probably need an on/off button or app specific like push is.
animation view which will be reduce developer to make a cool app , of course the core business local still need consider more , but the view layer could more easy to use ....