In my iPhone app I am trying to gather feedback on my game via an optional survey. I would like to send this data to a central server, where I could gather all the statistics and process them to have a bar chart or other convenient presentation.
The data being sent an integer representing the user's preference. ie) Given "How did you like our game?", the user could select from a button from :) :\ :( . Eventually I would also like to have audio feedback where the user could record their voice. The variable length sound clip would be sent and stored from an iPhone to some server, for playback later.
Has anybody done something similar? Google Spreadsheets offers an API which I can't make heads nor tails of but I think it will support a tally of responses. ie) I received 10 goods, 4 neutral, and 7 poor ratings. As far as I can tell I wouldn't be able to store a sound clip in a spreadsheet.
I also looked into Google App engine but if possible I'd like to avoid the networking code to transmit the survey data and the server side scripts to interpret the data. Can somebody recommend a simple API that I could use to store integers for viewing? Ideally I'd like to say something simple like
if (response == "Good") MyGoogleSpreadsheet.MyAppStats.Increment(positiveResponseTallyCell);
Later on I'd just log into Googlespreadsheets and the results would be there for me to read. By the way I don't have to necessarily use a spreadsheet. I just want this to be easy. Bonus points if the API supports the storage and playback of sound but integers will suffice for now.
You can do this with the Flurry API (flurry.com) which lets you specify which custom events to log, and gives you charts and downloadable CSV. Very easy to use:
[FlurryAPI startSession: flurryID];
[FlurryAPI logEvent:#"QUESTION1" withParameters:#"Good"];
Although Flurry is made for general usage statistics gathering, I think it would be a quick and easy way to accomplish what you want.
I know you said you've already taken a look at the Google Spreadsheets API, but you may not have seen the GData Objective-C framework which includes support for reading/writing to and from Google Docs spreadsheets (via the GDataServiceGoogleSpreadsheet class).
Related
I have been working with flutter for a couple of months now and it seems that there isn't really too much to work on an app for back-end or advanced functionality. I love using Flutter to help me design the UI but I want to use another language to help me do some other stuff. For example, I want to display a full-screen camera page (almost like Snapchat) or like send a direct message to another user through the app. Do I even need another language to do stuff like this? I am not an advanced programmer. I just want to create simple applications that can process and store a little bit of stuff.
You can easily do the mentioned stuff in Flutter/Dart.
Check out Firebase Messaging for direct messages and SQLite to store information on user devices.
For saving data locally,
You can use SqlFlite, a plugin with the help of which you can easily store and manage your database.
For saving data on the backend, so that other users can also access it when necessary, like the one you mentioned in a comment (..food ordering app)..you can use Firebase
Firebase has all you need.
Link to firebase :- https://firebase.google.com/
When your data is stored on a cloud, you don't need to hard code anything, for example, about the food ordering app you mentioned, you can make use of variables, in which you can store the values. So that when the owner changes the price, it gets updated.
I have created a few small apps for the iPhone so I have some experience. An organization that I'm in asked me if I could program a weekly newsletter app for them. I though it would be a good challenge so I agreed. My question is: how do I get the app to update weekly without the users having to re-download or manually update? Do I connect to a database or a website? Can anyone send me the link to a good tutorial? I wasn't able to find one.
Thank you!
Your question is very general but I could give you some suggestions.
First, you need to connect to a service that provides you news info. This is needed. The service could send you an xml that you can parse and display, for example in a UITableView. XML is not the only solution. You could use also JSON.
For parsing XML I suggest you to read GDataXML, while for JSON JSONKit framework. But there are also other valid framework out there.
Then, to save data it depends on what kind of data you deal with. Here you could find different ways to save your news. Save an XML that contains your news, serialize data and save them in the local filesystem or use Core-Data.
To update your news without user actions, you have to save the last time when the app has downloaded news (for example in NSUserDefaults) and each time time the application is "activated" check for that date and update news if necessary.
Out there there are plenty of tutorials on how to (in parenthesis I inserted classes or framework that you could have a look):
consuming web service on iPhone (ASIHttpRequest - no more supported, NSURLConnection class, AFNetworking)
dealing with XML file/data and theirs parsing (GDataXML, touchXML, etc.)
dealing with JSON messages (JSONKit, etc.)
managing documents (NSFileManager class)
using Core-Data
using Property-List and/or NSUserDefaults
First three cover the first step (download). Other three cover the second one (save). Obviously you have not to use all of them. For example a configuration could be:
NSURLConnection for service, GDataXML for parsing XML data and Property-List for save data.
Hope it helps.
A simpler approach would be to make it a pure web app and update the website weekly.
Your content providers are going to have to do those updates anyway.
Check: Adding Newsstand Support to Your App or Tutorial: How To Make Your App Work With The Newsstand
I'm creating an iPhone Game where I want the user to get a unique numeric code when they first launch the app, that way when a friend of that user opens it, he/she can input that code and both users can get rewarded. I haven't encountered any issues regarding that, however what I want to do is make it to where the app registers the code given to every user and saves it to a website of some sort. That way when the other user enters the code, it will load the data from that website and check if it's registered. How would I manage to save the data onto a website? and also What free website could I use for this without having a character limit on the body page?
-Thanks in advance
Your thinking is correct, in that you need to save your data somewhere online, but you don't really "save data onto a website" in the way that you're describing. "Free Website" services usually serve a different purpose entirely - that of serving up public html pages. Sure, they can take the form of a CMS (like wordpress.com or tumblr accounts), but using that as an interface for storing your application's data is not something they're typically designed to do.
For something like this, where you have a public iPhone app that requires secure access to custom strings, you really want to have control over your own web server (different than a domain name, btw), and interface with a database on that server. This will come at a cost, and will involve more code than you're likely to find someone to write for you on here. Sorry to say it, but hey if someone wants to prove me wrong I'd love to see it.
Because all you need to store & retrieve are random strings (basically referral codes... if I'm understanding correctly), your database needs are pretty simple. If you're not familiar with things like PHP / MySQL, and you don't want to learn, it might be worth reaching out to some server-side developers for help. Unless there's more to it than you describe, you can probably find someone to help you for relatively cheap.
Good luck - and I'm sorry there isn't a simpler answer for ya.
You can send data using NSURLConnection. Just create an NSMutableURLRequest and call its -setHTTPMethod: method with “POST” as the HTTP method. Then, set its body and header fields appropriately, and you can use NSURLConnection to send the data.
I'm putting on my thinking cap for this one, looking for a high level overview of possibility. I'm the author of an iPhone app that tracks user generated statistics. Data is essentially stored in a table on the device, with each entry having several fields/columns. Users can then sort that data, view graphs, and do other nerdy number crunching stuff. I want to take it farther and incorporate a sharing platform online. Game Center, Open Feint and other third party platforms are too narrow in scope. I'm interested in writing a web app, that users can visit to do three things:
Post New Table entries (automated by device)
View own entries and share via web (read only)
View other members table entries (read only)
Is Google App Engine a viable solution for this? My iOS app will require a POST URL, and the web app will need to save that authenticated user's data, and possibly return an "identifier" value to be referenced in the future in case the user needs to modify the item on the web. It will also require a GET URL to retrieve the authenticated user's statistics one by one or in total.
Next, the user will be able to visit the website and type in a "username" (probably email address) and see read-only statistics that have been submitted.
Thank you in advance for your input.
Sure, you could do all that with App Engine. If you wanted to, you could even make that local table of data sync with your app on GAE.
Really, there's not much on GAE that you can't do, although sometimes the database layer take some time to get used to.
My personal preference would be to set up a Django instance, but you could use any Python or Java-based app, depending on what you're comfortable with.
In short, yeah, you won't have any trouble doing basic REST work with GAE, and you could probably push it harder to do some more number crunching on those stats.
I am newbie to iPhone development, I want to do a kind of POC which fulfill the following requirement.
It will be basically a calling card application where user will enter a toll free number followed by pin number. After entering a pin no. it will show the available contacts from the iPhone itself, user will select a desired destination number and call it.
I know this is a whole new native application, but can anyone guide me how I can start working on the same. I have collected a few information about what calling card is and how it works. I'm a bit confused about how can I get the information from calling cards service provider?. Do i need to call there API and how to do a code in the XCODE tool?
Please help me in this regard.
A quick google of calling card api's shows that most card companies have them, but they also don't publish them. Looks like you'll have to talk directly with them and get api specs. It may cost you? I'm guessing the actual API won't be very complicated... a couple of HTTP requests and a little bit of response parsing. You might want to look into asi-http-request for building the requests, and you can probably do most of the response parsing with NSStrings or NSXMLParser if they use XML.