Is there any way to do this?
In other words, is it possible during a call to allow the user to open a certain application? (for example, to provide information based on the person who is calling).
If not, will something like this be available on iOS 4?
You can open an application during a call (not automatically).
User can press the home button (the one that is under the screen) during a call and open some third party application.
Another issue is to retrieve the contact that the user is talking to now - I believe that this is impossible.
Regarding iOS 4 - I am pretty sure that this will be possible...
No.
AFAIK, there are two ways to launch an application:
The user taps the icon
The user responds to a push notification
You cannot directly control when your app is launched. Furthermore, once your app is running, there is no way to access information about the current call.
Related
I am thinking to make my own app like Find My iPhone app . But I am confused that whether apple allow developers to have access to play with the security or is there such Apple API's that can help us to include features as in the above app. Any suggestions?
Well I just can't comment because of low reputation. But people must give a reason to down-grade a question. Its quite a valid question.
Creating an app like this is semi possible. Due to the fact that you are not allowed to keep running in the background, except for certain special cases. Such as Music or a guidance app (navigation apps)
Your app can register to receive updates from the GPS location and process them.
The problem is it will use your gps all the time.
The find my iphone app is a combination of wifi location/sim card location/gps location.
It uses a combination of all these items which it has to keep track of your location as close as possible. Now back to your question, the fact that you cannot keep running in the background, will mean the app needs to stay open all the time (open I mean running, not necessarily onscreen). Not like the application from apple itself, which of course is allowed to go outside these developer restrictions.
The APIs exist for you to create the main functionality of this app. Core Location and APNS
When use A is looking for the location of user B, A would tell a server that it needs user B's location.
A push notification could fire up user B's app, at which point...
User B's location services would kick in, in the background,
Send this information to your server
Then update user A with another push notification.
I am a newcomer to application development and I'm wondering if the concept I have can actually be created.
My concept involves creating an app that has the ability to embed another app within itself.
I'll do an example which is also a very bad one but you'll at least get the point.
Picture an app on the iphone that's called "Kwesi's app". Once you tap on it, it opens up a page with 3 icons. A facebook icon, a gmail icon and a hotmail icon. Now tap your finger on the gmail icon and instantly your gmail opens up withing "Kwesi's app" and you have full access. There is also a button in the top left corner that says "Main Menu". Once you tap the "Main Menu" icon, you go back to the three icons and can now rinse and repeat.
I hope this example is clear enough.
The question I seem to be coming back to is, would it be possible having an application that embeds or links you to other apps in that manner? I can only guess that it'd be really weird since they'd have to be installed seperately on your phone but I don't want that. I want one app that can handle an already set amount of apps within itself as the above example shows.
Thank you very much for reading and any thought would be very much appreciated.
/Kwesi
No, that is not possible in iOS for security reasons. But you have the following choices to modify your idea:
Register a protocol for the app : This will allow you to send data between applications using protocols. However, if the app wasn't made by you and doesn't have a protocol, then you can't use it.
Using this idea, it is possible to open an application. For example, opening Facebook with "fb://" or evernote with "evernote://". I am sure there are other applications that have these protocols. Just be aware that you don't have control on the application in this case. You can only open it and send data to it.
Since your example was about Facebook, Gmail. Then I would suggest using their corresponding API and build everything in your application. Many famous applications provide APIs for a fee or free usage. You have to check with each one separately.
Since few days i am searching for the functionality which will allow me keep user posted that application is running in background. I have attached a !image for what exactly i am looking for. i tried googling but could not get exactly what I need. when i tap on the flashing red bar it takes me back to the application.
Thanks in advance.
The red banner you pictured is provided by the system, is shown only if your application uses background audio recording (see AVAudioSession), and doesn't provide the opportunity for you to choose what happens when the user taps it.
Unless your app fits into one of a few specific classes, it doesn't actually "run" while in the background. Instead, it's "suspended" -- still in memory, but gets no CPU time. What happens outside of your app is thus up to the system, not to you... the only way to show a banner that will launch your application is to use a push notification service or UILocalNotification, but those banners are only shown briefly, and you don't get to control their duration. What you seem to be specifically asking for isn't possible using public API.
The kind of notification you want isn't supported by the current iOS for third-party developers.
If you want that kind of functionality then implement Apple Push Notification service through
this you can first give message to Apple push notification service. then Apple service
automatically generate notification for your App as you want.
I want to send my Application to background simply clicking on Button inside my Application.
Is there any way to call applicationdidenterbackground manually or any other way ?
iOS Human Interface Guidelines says "Don't Quit Programmatically", whereby quitting must be understood as including "suspending":
Never quit an iOS application programmatically because people tend to interpret this as a crash. However, if external circumstances prevent your application from functioning as intended, you need to tell your users about the situation and explain what they can do about it. Depending on how severe the application malfunction is, you have two choices.
Display an attractive screen that describes the problem and suggests a correction. A screen provides feedback that reassures users that there’s nothing wrong with your application. It puts users in control, letting them decide whether they want to take corrective action and continue using your application or press the Home button and open a different application
If only some of your application's features are not working, display either a screen or an alert when people activate the feature. Display the alert only when people try to access the feature that isn’t functioning.
If you really want to exit your app programmatically, then you can call exit(0);, but I doubt that you app will pass the Apple review.
Unfortunately There is no any officialy way to force app to background state(Pause state).
In the home page of my iphone app, there is a button added. When that button is clicked some other iphone app needs to be opened in a new viewcontroller (with out closing the parent app).There will be a back button on this view controller. When the back button is clicked, the new viewcontroller which is showing the another app needs to be closed and our parent app's home page needs to be shown.
Please give me some ideas on how to do this. I googled for this i didnt get any solutions.
Thanks,
Raja.
-- the following applies to iOS versions previous than 4.0 :)
Actually, there can be only one iPhone application running at once (with exceptions of Safari, Phone and some other system applications). The iPhone Human Interface Guidelines say so:
Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.
However, if you only need to e.g. show a webpage, you can do it using UIWebView
Also, if you need to open another application, you should use URLs as pointed by Steve Harrison. This will, however, close your application. The recommended behavior in this case is to remember your application state and restore it when the application is run again, as Nithin writes.
According to apples documentation, they are not allowing any applications to be run in the background, except system generated ones. So you will be unable to do the thing you are going to implement. However, there is one thing that can make the same result.
You told that you are calling other application to run on a button click. Before initiating that application, save the current state of your application, may be using sqlite3 or core-data, and then open the other one. While returning back, load the pre-saved data from the database or wherever you have stored it. Every time you start the application, you check for the persisted data, if exists, load it or otherwise load your basic view
I don't think that you can run other iPhone apps within your own one. It doesn't make sense. You can open another iPhone app via a URL (see here and here), but this will close your app.
Like it has been stated: running two apps is not allowed by apple. You can however implement this apps features into you're app and have both get and save data to the same server...
Or like Nithin said: this functionality is available on JB iphones. Look into "backgrounder" for implementing one solution for normal users and one for thouse that has jailbroken.