I'd like to use Urban Airship to send push notifications to a user's iPhone when a new Twitter Search result is found.
I'm pretty positive I'd need a web app built to accomplish this - to register the user's iPhone, save their search terms and poll Twitter Search. How could I go about building this app (in terms of which language to use, etc.)?
Thanks so much.
You are right, you need to build a web app which automatically searches Twitter and then creates a push notification payload to deliver to your users. In addition, you may want your app to also accept requests from users to retrieve the actual tweets. This is because you can't just load up the tweet content into a notification payload, as their is a rather small size limit.
Since Urban Airship works via HTTP, you can use whatever the heck language you want. Just go with what you know, there is no preferred way to do it.
I will say this though - there are lots and lots of tweets added every second. Scalability is probably going to play a pretty big factor in whatever you are trying to do. Which is probably why a year later there aren't very many Twitter apps that support Push.
Everything said previously is correct, I just wanted to add one thing:
I strongly recommend looking into http://superfeedr.com to handle getting te data.
With Superfeedr, you can take advantage of their PubSubHubbub API and not have to do any of the RSS parsing yourself.
Here's how the flow would work:
User subscribes to a Twitter user/search on the phone.
Phone tells your service that User X has subscribed.
Your web app registers with superfeedr to watch that RSS feed (and you keep track of this relationship)
When a new item appears, Superfeedr POSTs to your web app with the latest items.
You look up the relationship between user and feed and tell Urban Airship to send an alert to that user.
This way, all your webapp has to do is intelligently keep track of relationships.
#bpapa is right and you should use the language you know best. Also, I would recommend looking into Twitter Streaming API, it will help you make your application actually realtime.
Related
I want to know if I can access a user's play history (more specifically what songs they listen to the most) for an app. The app I am building can perform the same goal with iTunes using their built-in play counter. I know Spotify uses a similar counter, but I assume for privacy concerns they don't want to deal with privacy concerns from concerned users. However, I saw a few instances where it was suggested that this task could be accomplished using Facebook's API, or Echo Nest's API. Please let me know if anyone has some constructive suggestions toward finding a way to legally obtain a particular users 'most listened to songs', or something to that effect.
SB
There's some documentation about Open Graph Music on the Facebook Developer homepage:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/music/
Baseline is that you only can request a User's play history if he gave you app the explicit right to read his data.
The relevant permissions would be
user_actions.music https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions/v2.1#reference-user_actions_music
user_actions:{app_namespace} https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions/v2.1#reference-user_actions__app_namespace_
Then, you should be able to request
GET /me/music.listens
according to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph/action-type/music.listens/ You'll need to perform the aggregation of the most played songs/artists yourself, because there's no endpoint for that.
I have an idea to develop a Facebook app which notifies the user through SMS when his/her friends come online. The user can pre-select the friends he/she wanted to get SMS notifications of.
This is my first attempt at developing for Facebook so I have zero experience and knowledge about the platform. I just want to know if my idea for such an app is possible? Does Facebook have an API for SMSes? Or do they let 3rd party messaging APIs (such as this one I came across) to work with them.
Thank you.
A Facebook app is actually ran off of your server and you can do anything that you want as long as you stay inside the limits of what you requested as far as information the app needs. As far and getting the information it is relatively easy. I made a extremely complicated app in 3 days. Once you read and get how to pull certain information, the rest is cake walk
I am developing an app for Lawyers to be used here in Brazil and one of the features of this app is to track the phase of the lawsuit as it develops through time.
It works like this: the user fill a form within the app with the info on the lawsuit and it is stored in a database. Whenever the user wants to know if the lawsuit has any new record, he'll push a button and will get the records ordered by date.
The website that the app will fetch is http://www.tjpb.jus.br the problem is that I don´t know how to code in order to get the app access that site, input the lawsuit number and get the reply displayed on an UIWebView.
So could anyone help me, or just give me a guide on where to find a solution for this?
You will need to asynchronously go to server(via that url) and parse data, then show the responses in UIWebView. But as far as i know you will need a PUSH Server and clerify which data you will show from that site.. This is a great source to get started with app development, you can find video lectures in i-Tunes too
I'm not sure what you really want to do, but one scenario could be that you build a URL, like
http://www.tjpb.jus.br/?...&...
and load it in an UIWebView or if there is a webservice there you should use a lib like ASIHTTPRequest to manage your API calls.
I need to develop an iPhone/Android app in which users can share their friend's online/offline status in real time.
When a user launches the app, the app shows which user is online. If someone changes the status, the other users can know this change.
This is almost the same function of Skype online/offline notification.
How can I implement this functionality? (I think maybe I should use Apple Push Notification Server for the iPhone app.)
Does anyone know any tutorials, example/similar code, or any other useful references?
Push Notifications are not a good ideea. They are not real-time. The best way of implementing the needed behaviour is to have a thread polling the server (and will also work with any mobile/non-mobile OS).
On the server you should have 2 services:
(1) one that retrieves your friend list initial statuses and stores it
(2) another (the one that you poll) that only returns the statuses that changed meantime
You can implement if-modified-since on the (2)nd service so that your information exchange could be kept at a minimum.
Hope it helped
This is really just a "what-if" type question, so forgive me if it is either ridiculous or ridiculously easy...
I have a client whose site offers a "chat with a consultant" option that you see on many sales and support sites. We were wondering if there was a way that iPhone users (or any user, in theory, but mostly iPhone) could click this option and after giving the basic form info (name, question,etc) the actual chat itself could open up in the chat client.
Is this as simple as the "click here to send me an AIM message" syntax?
The XMPP (jabber) server is Openfire and the webchat uses the Fastpath plugin. Would this feature need to be enabled deeper than the page's HTML/PHP? Does the server/plugin need to modified as well?
Would this threaten the security of the XMPP server (which is behind a firewall and can only be accessed externally via the above plugin)?
Does this even sound like something that iPhone users would appreciate, or would it simply be confusing/obtrusive?
Sorry for the objective last question, but I'd hate to spend time on this only irritate users.
Referrals to resources and documentation welcome. I'm not looking for someone to walk me through the whole thing, I just want to get an idea of it can be done and where to start reading.
I'm a little confused by what you want to do - the user fills out a form on a web site and then they are put into a "chat room" on their iPhone?
This is possible. However all of them require that the user has already installed your app, so it may be a hurdle to what you are trying to do.
However if it's using a pre-existing chat service (such as AIM), you may already be OK if the user already has a chat client installed on their iPhone. You could launch the app using custom urls or push notifications - however, this is assuming that the app developer has enabled such hooks, and if so if they are published.
If you want to go with your own client, if the user is filling out the form on the iPhone, then on submission you could redirect them to a custom url for your application. From mobile Safari, this will directly launch your app. Note that the user must already have the app installed for this to work, or else they'll see an error, and it won't be a particularly user-friendly one.
Another way, if the user is filling out the form on their computer, is via push notification. Again, they must first have the app installed. They would receive a notification that, on acceptance, launches your app.
The final way, if the user is filling out the form on their computer, is that they would have to download your app first and run it, so that it could communicate with a desktop client of yours via network services.