I am wondering how I can send data between a machine and a mobile device. I know about the game kit an have read a bit about bonjour (but don't know to much about it), but would like to know some expert thoughts on what the best way is.
What I basically want to build is a one way traffic application that sends data from OSX to the mobile device (iPhone, iPod touch or iPad). The data send is either pictures, text (of a certain size and position ect) or video. The mobile device just has to receive this data and display it... nothing more.
My guess is that a WiFi solution would be best.
How could I best do this? Are there any tutorials that might help me putting this together?
Thanks in advance!
Best regards,
Paul Peelen
As no reply yet . . .
Bonjour is more focused on LAN networks, so would restrict you to WiFi.
It's also more of a service discovery standard - your Mac app would advertise the service on the LAN, and clients could see it - but your actual app communications will run on a different TCP socket, using whatever protocol is appropriate.
This linked answer may be helpful (although you will want CFNetwork in reverse - pushing from Mac to phone)
[iPhone]: How send output stream via wireless network?
For video you are probably better off looking for higher level frameworks (i.e. the AV ones).
Without knowing the full details of what you want to do, I wonder if rather than pushing data to the iPhone, the best thing would be to send a lightweight notification to the iPhone (AMQP, XMPP, or similar protocol) passing a URL back to the resource on the Mac - that way you could use standard HTTP GET for images, video, etc, on the iPhone side, throw the URL at a webkit view to display - and on your Mac side you could then use an off-the-shelf web server (Apache, or an embedded HTTP server within your code).
Related
My iPhone connects over adhoc wifi to a wifi sensor module.
The challenge is to code an app that uses this sensor module. But I'm not sure what specific API's to use to best architect this implementation.
I've started looking into the CocoaAsyncSocket class as it seems to be an appropriate tool for such use.
Does the user always have to manually connect to the adhoc wifi device? (through the Settings app) or can my own app handle the searching, making, and breaking of the wifi connection?
I doubt iOS lets me programmatically toggle whether Wifi is on/off.
Once the sensor data is being received, what container would best handle the stream?
For example, on other platforms, I coded a rotating queue buffer.
Thanks for your input.
Edit: The protocol in question is straight CSV formatted ASCII. Not HTTP, FTP, etc. Just raw data. The app is to simply open a port on the connected IP, and read/write.
Your application cannot turn wifi on/off, or select a wifi network.
Without more information on what protocols this wifi sensor module speaks, it will be impossible for anyone to give more than vague recommendations. If the module can serve data over an http connection, that would probably be ideal. If it requires your software to open a connection on a specific port and communicate over something other than http or ftp, your job will be a bit more complicated. CFNetwork and projects derived from it's usage, such as CocoaAsyncSocket which you mentioned. You can see another implementation of an HTTP connection over CFNetwork in ASIHTTPRequest, that may help as a reference for handling download streams, queuing operations, etc.
As for storing the data, again it's hard to give any concrete recommendations without more information. If you want to store the data to the filesystem of the iOS device, NSData will probably meet your needs. If you need/prefer to use a queue for buffering data, there is a simple category on NSArray which provides queue semantics. The link to CHCircularBuffer in that SO article is dead, but this github project appears to have it.
edit: Here is the official version of the CHDataStructures. I don't know if it's an improvement over the previous link, but it appears to be updated for the more recent iOS SDK.
Add the SSID of your wifi ad hoc networks in settings. When you see the SSID of the network, click the arrow and choose connect automatically. After this, the phone will automatically connect whenever it comes in range. After this, the two devices can communicate using regular socket APIs.
Can someone please point me in the right direction to create a Mac/PC server app that runs in the background and connects to an iPad app over the local WiFi network?
No matter how I phrase a search on Google it just brings up various apps like Remote Mouse and whatnot and no tutorials or even a hint of where to start.
I just need to send simple commands from iPad to computer over local wifi. A point in the right direction and I can likely fill in the blanks.
Thank you.
Thomas
EDIT: I am using web languages for the iPad version that I will build as a native app using open source tools.
OK, then. It actually depends on what you really need. I made the assumption you need real-time and perhaps binary data transfer.
Your best bet is to write your server application using standard C or C++ so it compiles on both as simply as possible.
If you want to avoid all the burden of writing a protocol for service discovery or asking users to enter the ip address of your server you will use a mDNS implementation for your server and your iPhone app.
If I were you I would try bonjour: http://www.apple.com/support/bonjour/
on iPhone You could start here: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networking/Conceptual/NSNetServiceProgGuide/Articles/PublishingServices.html
Once you have your sockets you will have to implement a networking protocol between your server application and your iPhone app.
You will have to be careful about byte ordering and little subtle problems with latency, disconnections and other problems inherent to networking and WiFi.
In windows you will want to register your application as a service and in Mac OS X/UNIX you'll probably want to deamonize it.
Good luck!
I'm just getting started with mobile development, and after considerable searching I'm still confused about sending a message from my iPhone to another or an Android. For instance, in building a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game, if I want to notify the other phone of a move, what is the best way to do so? Wifi, bluetooth, 3G? And how?
Many methods seem to point to communicating through a web server, but I'd rather send them directly from phone to phone if possible. (this is for native apps of course)
If you don't want to have a server (or even if you do! It depends!) it sounds like you will want to use TCP sockets. Apple doesn't have a generic bluetooth API to use with iPhone-to-android communication and you'll have TCP access anyway with 3G. A 3G network connection is very similar to wifi and you should be able to check for the difference as needed with little change to your overall networking code. I'm not sure if bonjour is supported on android, but I bet someone has ported it for similar reasons already, and it is supported in iOS. Apple has a networking section for iOS that you may find informative.
Additionally if you want to stay within the iOS device only realm you could use GameKit to communicate via bluetooth.
Hope that helps some.
The easiest way is to create a web server with an API and the clients poll the server for new moves (or the server pushes the client an update). This is the only way you're going to be able to do it over 3G unless you can figure out the IP addresses of both phones (do phones even keep the same IP address for a long period of time?) and open up sockets between them and let one phone be the server and the other be the client (could cause potential cheating).
WiFi is not always there - by limiting your users' options to areas with access points, you'll lose sales. Not sure about Bluetooth - how prevalent is it on handsets, how much of the API is exposed. Your best bet, IMHO, is 3G. With some kind of a central presence server (Web or otherwise), with optional proxying. Read up on peer-to-peer networking.
As far as i know does the iphone only support incoming messages over push notifications.
This means, that you have to update the information, by requesting it from web services etc.
The bluetooth API of the iphone doesn't support this either.
I want to send some Text plus a image from one iphone application to other iphone app but restriction is I should not use a web server in between communication,Is there any way to fulfill it ?
Details: There are two independent devices and could be far enough say out of network. My requirement one app adds some text with a image and sends it to another iphone which can be at any long distance , and the app installed in another iphone will read that info and image into itself.
Actually there is a solution that meets your needs — and that fits to bbums answer:
Create a HTTP-Server on the iPhone, using cocoahttpserver. than you will ask some webservice like whatismyip.com for your public ip. with this your iPhone can be connected worldwide.
But very likely ur wifi-network is not forwarding your port to the iPhone. Ash.
And even if: Now it gets difficult. How to publish your ip from one phone to the other? hmmm... — I got it: I will exchange the information in a centralized space! In the web!
... wait — that would be a Webserver.
You see: Without any kind of server in the Web the users would need to exchange ip manually and have full admin power and knowledge about the local network.
So IMHO bbums answer is the only way to go.
PS: I am working with http server running on iPhones. In local network that works great, especially with bonjour. And you can use them over distance network — but only with reconfiguration of your router — something you shouldn't force your user to do
There is far from enough information to provide a specific answer.
two apps on two different devices?
are the two devices on the same network?
are the two devices both on WiFi?
do you need the user to receive a notification or something if the app isn't running?
If on same device, you can define a custom URL handler in the destination app and then openURL: in the source app to pass the data over. Encode your image and text into the URL, but be careful of size limitations.
If on different devices, there are many possible solutions, but answering the above questions will be critical to actually knowing what solution is appropriate.
Given your comment -- two apps, different devices, arbitrary networks -- then you are going to have to have some kind of server in between. Note that the recently added Game Center does have the ability to rendezvous two users, but it has a very particular user experience that may not be appropriate to your needs.
I would suggest that you investigate using push notifications to notify the receiving user of the availability of content. As for moving the content between, no direct connection is possible and you will have to have some kind of store-and-forward server in between. And, yes, a web server is going to be the easiest possible solution simply because HTTP is ubiquitous these days.
If there's no network of any kind available, but both parties have amateur radio licenses, then hooking the two devices up to HF packet radios might work.
THIS is super EASY.
I would code up some software that can turn data into modem signal, like the good old dial up modem. The device would actually make those annoying buzzing sounds.
You get the phone number for your friends nearest landline and call him.
He places his iPhone near the phones receiver in listen mode and you connect to his phone using your audible modem.
Bingo, via the power of sounds you have sent data which is decoded on his device and all for the very cheap price of a phone call, there are pretty cheap these days especially if you use Skype.
Easy Way (relatively speaking)
A way two apps on different networks can communicate without setting up a web server of some sort is as follows.
Use an existing third party storage system like DropBox.
Each app would need the login and password for your DropBox. Then both apps can read and write files that the other app can see.
An existing app that does this is a shopping list app called ShopShop.
The app on my phone and my wife's phone both link to the same DropBox account and the app keeps the shopping list synced up when one of us adds something to the list.
I have developed an iPhone app which stores photos in the /Documents directory of my app.
I would like to add a feature which gives to the user the opportunity to transfer those pictures to his/her PC or Mac.
I don't really know how to do that.
What is the best way, using Bonjour, bluetooth, or directly USB (if it is possible) ?
I really need some advices on that point ...
Any ideas ?
PS: Forgive my English, I am French :-)
Try NSNetService to register the service in Bonjour, and NSFileHandle to send data over a socket connection associated with the service.
If you do not want to write a Mac or PC part for your app then you can also consider to build in a little http server that people can use to access the data in your app. There are some nice open source http servers available for Cocoa which you can find with Google.
Using Bonjour you can advertise your http server so that people can easily find it with a Bonjour enabled browser like Safari. (Your iPhone app's web server will appear automatically under the dynamic bonjour bookmarks items)
You've edited the question to say that it's about transferring photos. Could you store the photos on the iPhone's photo roll with UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(), and let Apple handle getting them onto the computer?
Bonjour!
I mean that both as a greeting and an answer. You have to setup a bonjour connection over wifi to transfer files directly to and from an app. That's actually pretty simple to do on both the iPhone and Mac side. The PC is a little tougher.
You can do bluetooth but bluetooth capability is still fairly rare on desktops.
Without knowing more about your specific application, I agree with Graham Lee--either directly saving to the Camera Roll or giving the user an option to save one or more photos to the Camera Roll is much simpler than http/bonjour.