So I am working on a bundle of applications for my company for the iPad and am trying to figure out if it is possible to install an app but hide the icon. It will not need to be launched from the desktop directly. Instead, I have created a launch desktop that controls login and the launch of the actual apps via custom URL schemes. We decided to do this so we can have many people developing different apps at the time time that quickly and easily connect to a single login and launch desktop. We are trying to make all of the services we offer interconnected.
Does anyone know if this is possible? Or am I going to have to redirect to the login app if the user launches any of the individual apps. That is what we were trying to avoid. It would be incredibly annoying and clunky for the user. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
No is the short answer, you can't install an app and hide the icon.
Even if you could, your architecture sounds pretty clunky. If your services are interconnected, then would it not be better to have everything in the same app? There are plenty of ways to share coding between many developers without everyone having their own, separate app.
Maybe.
There used to be a trick where if you installed so many apps that you filled up every page, any apps installed after that would not have a visible icon (but you could run them via a Spotlight search).
If this behavior still exists, then fill up your iPad's launcher/springboard with apps (download 100's of free games, etc.), then install the apps that you want to be invisible, then delete all the games, and your chosen app might remain with an "invisible" icon.
Related
I've seen a similar question from nearly 2 years ago and I'm wondering if anything has changed.
I need to make the installation of a very simple web app more automatic, so that people can just click a link to install it, with maybe a confirmation button to let the iOS security know it's legitimate. The current process of having to add the shortcut to the homescreen, cuts out a large demographic that are used to more user friendly options.
Any help would be appreciated.
I'm afraid the "Add to homescreen" process is a necessary evil here (mainly due to security concerns with how the browser might interact with the springboard otherwise).
If you really don't think your audience can handle this (I'd guess that they can, if they've used a mobile browser at all), you could also add a button or popup that launches a short How-to to walk them through the process.
I'm learning iOS programming. I was wondering if there is any way to show the icons of all the running apps in the phone. I know how to get a list of apps that are running currently, but is it possible to access their icons?
If not, what is the best way to do this? Crawl the appstore for icons and store it in the app?
As far as I know there is no API for getting the current running apps in iOS (but there is something like this for Android).
If you want to show only the currently running app icons, how will crawling appstore help?
If you cannot do it directly through some API trickery, how about a sideways workaround? If you know the names of the apps that are running, you could build a process that grabs the app icons through the iTunes Store Search API (using NSData's initWithContentsOfURL: method (docs), or with NSURLConnection and its delegates).
It might be a bit convoluted, but is probably the most straightforward way of getting the icon of any app that might be running.
I have tried to grab app icons using the API and I make it!
Take an example of app yelp, the premise is you get the buddleid of this app, which you can refer to Finding list of installed apps on iphone
And https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?bundleId=com.yelp.yelpiphone
helps to get the information in the form of json. Use the value for key "artworkUrl60" to get the icon of yelp
I am asking this question mainly to know if what I want to do is possible. I don't think there is an app that does it and I've been meaning to learn objective C, but it may not be possible.
I want an app that serves as the ONLY way (at least, the only easy way) to launch another app. So in an ideal world, you have MyApp, which lists app A, B, and C. A B and C are not visible on the normal browser, but can be launched from within my app.
Possible? Not?
Not possible. And its most likely that such a functionality will never make it into the official SDK.
What you're trying to do isn't really possible. It isn't possible (with the official development kit) to create iOS applications that don't appear on the home screen.
It is possible to launch other applications, though -- one common approach is to set them as URL handlers for private URL schemes. This can be used to pass information between applications. (However, trying to use this as access control won't work, because Apple will likely reject an application which can only be opened "correctly" by another app.)
Depends on your definition of App.
You can just have a master app which creates the illusion of being an app launcher by "opening" subroutines. Imagine like the old facebook iphone app for example
NO
Well... This has been done for years on the Cydia store with some custom menus but we wont get into that here...
Using the official SDK I think there are protocols to allow you to open an another application but pressing the home button for example will always go back to the default screen. I think ever if you were able to get it working, there is no chance it would be accepted into the App Store on grounds of it not doing anything the phone already does.
By all means look up jailbreaking and using the custom tool chain but you won't be able to sell this through Apple unfortunatley.
i was wondering, i have a little experience making iPhone apps but no coding background in anything and was wondering.... Is there a way to update your iPhone app with new text, pictures, colors, links, etc. without manually doing it from Xcode then having to get the new version approved by apple.
I was hoping to be able to update it from possibly from my website. Any easy way to do this? Preferably the easiest solution. Thanks in advance
There is, but you have to design the application to do it from the start. Instead of reading from the app itself, the app reads from a content management system (CMS) or even just a text file stored on your website. Many apps work this way, but you will need to design the app with this in mind.
For the amount of things you need updated, I would create a iPhone optimized version of your website and in your app, all you would need is a web view that takes the user to your website. So to change content, you could just change your website and the user will think that the app is getting updated. One thing to keep in mind though, if the user doesn't have internet connection or if there internet is slow, the site my not show up at all or be very slow to respond and load. Hope this helps.
I have developed a website in asp.net for iPhone.
Now I am stuck in how to deploy that site on the iphone?
Never done it before.
How to make it iphone ready so the device can access the site ?
Any ideas...
Thank you All.
Social Circus, as Mehrdad says you don't need to change anything to allow users with iPhones to access your site; iPhones use a mobile version of Safari that renders pretty much everything like a normal desktop browser. There are a few things worth noting however if you want iPhone users to have a good experience browsing your site:
No Flash. If you've used Flash at all in your site it won't work on iPhones (or most other mobile platforms).
The resolution of the iPhone is 320x480. The top and bottom bars will take off a minimum of 20+44 = 66 pixels. You could implement a CSS template that re-formated everything into 320 pixel width but this is a lot of work. See something like Google Mail in an iPhone browser for an example.
iPhone users will be able to add a shortcut to your webapp on their desktop, with a name they want, so the actual URL matters less from this perspective.
Finally, it's worth noting that many iPhone users think of webapps as a bit "passe" - a bit old (man that's sooo 2008!). This isn't really fair but it's mostly true. With 65,000+ apps on the app store no-one's going around looking for webapps any more. For a better chance of adoption, especially if it's something like a game, perhaps look at using the SDK to write an iPhone-specific version? (quite a lot of work usually!!)
Hope that helps
Copy the stuff to the Web server, setup the databases if necessary, just as you'd do for a Web app designed for desktop browsers. Is this a real question?