I want to develop a native universal app(i.e for iPhone and iPad) for my orgaization.I want to include some of the essential features of the organiztion website into my native app.For obvious reasons i cant store this huge data into iPhone itself.so data will be fetched from the server but application would be a native app.so are there any APIs available to do this?
I always find it's easier to start using sample code, and lucky for you Apple provides a lot of this. Here is the reference library for all kinds of goodies to learn off of and hack your way through: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/navigation/index.html#section=Resource%20Types&topic=Sample%20Code
A few noted ones... (I left out some advanced ones like BonjourWeb Reachability and AdvancedURLConnections but look at those once you gain a little more understanding)
URL Cache: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/URLCache/Introduction/Intro.html
RSS Feed Parser: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/SeismicXML/Introduction/Intro.html
MailComposer: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/MailComposer/Introduction/Intro.html
Also, a couple books you should get to start your journey on iOS (these are two of the best and easy to understand IMO):
http://apress.com/book/view/9781430224594
http://apress.com/book/view/9781430225058
UIWebView will show any web page you point it to.
Maybe do a mixed approach with some stuff built right into the app, and the bigger or frequently changing parts load from the web.
You can use the UIWebView to access your organization's website from inside a native application...
While I agree that you may need to do your research first, the IPhone/Ipad SDK includes a very easy to use XML parser (NSXMLParser). I would suggest you devise a XML web service for retrieving the data from your company's servers and parse it on the ipad/iphone to the presentation you require.
Best of luck, i've found objective-c very rewarding/challenging.
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.
I'm planning to implement some app that performs similar functions as some website does. An app should be able to post, get and view some data. Most viewing data is available only after login. Payments. The webservices are .NET asmx XML services.
So, I'm planning to use UIKit, drag and drop some text fiels. For posting the data, I will do some manual input validation, assemble input into a string, post it to the server. Also, some parsing will be done after getting info form a webserver. Now, I haven't done any website app before, so I'm just curious what are the potencial problems that I might run into.
I guess you are asking about potential technical issues. The ones I faced recently working on an app of this type and workarounds are:
Maintaining your session with the server if you are combining native UI screens together with UIWebView's of your website.
XML Parsing can be hairy at times, so JSON is the best option depending on your preference. The other solution is to output XML in the PLIST format which is easier to code against. On the server side PHP has some PLIST generating libraries. Am not aware of what is available on .NET.
On the iOS side the ASIHTTP library helps make it easier to post to websites, particularly when you are using binaries etc.
Depending on your use case you may also consider a pure web based UI version which resides inside a UI webview. If you are planning on going this route JQueryMobile is a pretty good solution for rendering iOS like UIs. This saves you quite a lot of effort on the communicating with the webservice and parsing etc.
Thats all I can think of for now.
Biggest problem might be getting it approved by Apple if they think it should be just a website and not an app. They might cite: "Limited Functionality". see : https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html
I can also reccomend www.sudzc.com
Your UI will certainly not be as responsive as a native app.
Your users won't be able to use your app without an Internet connection/flaky connection
You'll have to rebuild all native controllers yourself if you wan't your app to look like a native iPhone app.
You'll have to rely on libraries like PhoneGap to use most of the hardware/non HTML supported functions (like geolocation, camera, etc.)
Etc.
Hey everyone. I have a fair amount of experience developing iOS apps, but nothing much with web/server interacting apps. For a project at work, I am making an app that will let you login, and get pictures off from a server that will then be downloaded for display and review on the local device.
I need to get some pointers on the correct approach to take. Are there built-in classes that make doing something like this easy? Once the cogent is downloaded from the server, it will be viewed locally, so all I need is to get a point in the right direction for logging in and communicating with a server…from an iPhone.
Can anybody point me in the right direction?
Me, I'm using ASIHTTPRequest Librayry to communicate / download with Internet.
For example, for an news app I download latest news in JSON (with a PHP script on a web server) and store datas with SQLite. If you need a little explanation of JSON with iPhone, check here (in french, but source codes are in english ^^)
When I need to download an image, I use ASIHTTPRequest and a queue to avoid downloading to much files at the same time.
If you want more information about a step, just say it.
Good Luck !
NURLConnection is your friend, along with its delegate methods.
Don't be lured by the temptation to use the -sendSynchronous method (which, now that I think about it, if you require authentication, you probably can't use anyway).
What is a strong iPhone framework to start out developing with, besides the SDK from Apple? Are there any that exist to speed up development time?
The biggest framework of this kind is Three20. Facebook and many other companies use this. Three20 is geared towards apps that pull data from the web. It helps with common patterns like a photo viewer or table view backed by web data. Another neat feature is that it has stylesheets, similar in concept to CSS.
Having said all that, some people like it and some do not. There was a brief period where apps using it were rejected from the App Store. Overall, the project looks to have improved since then.
ASIHTTPRequest
Excerpt
It is suitable performing basic HTTP
requests and interacting with
REST-based services (GET / POST / PUT
/ DELETE). The included
ASIFormDataRequest subclass makes it
easy to submit POST data and files
using multipart/form-data.
Also,
skpsmtpmessage
Excerpt
This code implements a quick class for
sending one off messages via SMTP on
the iPhone
EDIT:
A quick google search gave me this link
There is Mono Touch which enables you to develop using C#.
So I'm looking at writing an iPhone application that shows things on a map. What frameworks/methodologies are out there for doing this?
Searching around on Google, I could only find this one:
http://code.google.com/p/iphone-google-maps-component/
Which according to the issues list is slow, and stops working after a while. Does anyone know of something better, or have any experience with the library above?
I'm pretty sure your only options for now are:
Call openURL: to switch to the Maps app
Use the Google Maps component you linked to
Roll your own thing
Wait for Apple to expose a "MapKit" framework
WARNING: Embedding Google Maps inside an application may violate the Google Maps terms of service.
I have written a full mapping UIView on the iPhone (the application is on the AppStore) and it is not easy (this would be option #3 "Roll your own thing"). Getting good performance is really difficult. I would like to OpenSource my map component but right now the F-NDA is preventing that.
I have been chasing this for a while now, and here's the best solution I've found out there:
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/
There is a component in there called TouchMap and it comes with a demo that shows it off. It's tiles are loaded directly from Microsoft Virtual Earth.
Edit: #schwa, I just a look at your profile to find your email address, and then realised that you actually released this software. Nice work
I've just found route-me which looks like a large(30+) active community of ppl developing an open source mapping app for the iPhone. It can take tiles from OpenStreetMap, Virtual Earth(Bing) or Cloudmade.
just use mapkit framework.really good
alternatively: [[uiapplication sharedapplication]openurl:#"www.maps.google.com];
that will open the google map,but one problem with this is that it will navigate you to safari and your application will be exited and if you want to move back to your application from this web page,then it won't be possible .you again need to run the app.