Does anyone know the recommended way to check whether the device supports specific capabilities, for example the camera. I know I can detect the device the app is on with UIDevice but I was wondering if there is a way to enumerate the device's capabilities?
I'm not sure if there is a way to enumerate all of the device's capabilities. Usually, this check is done on a capability by capability basis.
So, to use your example, if you would like to know if the device you are running on has the capability to take a picture, you would:
[UIImagePickerController isSourceTypeAvailable:
UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypeCamera];
This would return true (YES) for any iPhone, and false (NO) for any iPod Touch (at least at the time of this writing).
Related
Is there a way to determine whether VoiceOver is currently announcing and when it stops. I've tried UIAccessibilityVoiceOverStatusChanged but my understanding is that this is only if you switch VoiceOver on or off. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks.
We use otherAudioIsPlaying, the problem is some app's running in the background like some pedometer monitors etc. turn on the audio it seems and never release it so even though nothing is actually being spoken or played otherAudioIsPlaying always returns 1 until you remove the other application from the background. So now not only can you not play music but you have no idea that another application in the background will mess up this test. Apple really needs to put in an API to determine if Voice Over is currently speaking or not.
These are all the Accessibility booleans that I found in the documentation:
UIAccessibilityPostNotification
UIAccessibilityIsVoiceOverRunning
UIAccessibilityIsMonoAudioEnabled
UIAccessibilityIsClosedCaptioningEnabled
UIAccessibilityRegisterGestureConflictWithZoom
I don't think that there are any booleans to do what you are talking about.
You could use the audio session's "OtherAudioIsPlaying" property to check if another system process is using the audio hardware at the moment. It should be "true" if VoiceOver is speaking and "false" if not.
Actually this might not work properly if the user is playing music in the background. But most users running VoiceOver will usually not have any other audio enabled permanently, since it makes it harder to understand what VoiceOver is saying.
Here is an example for usage:
UInt32 otherAudioIsPlaying;
UInt32 propertySize = sizeof(otherAudioIsPlaying);
AudioSessionGetProperty(kAudioSessionProperty_OtherAudioIsPlaying,&propertySize, &otherAudioIsPlaying);
if(otherAudioIsPlaying) {
// other application is generating sound output (including VoiceOver)
// but might also be any other app (like iPod App)
}
I have what i thought was a relatively simple question but i cannot find an answer to it yet. I have an iPhone app that uses GPS on one of its screens. I want to disable this screen using code when the app loads,so disable it when a iPod touch is being used. This is so it can still be useful on a iPod touch as there is a lot of functionality that a iPod touch user can use.
Thanks.
You can get there with #Aaron's answer, but that's not the way to do it. Use [CLLocationManager locationServicesEnabled]; to tell if you can determine the users's location. This is a lot more robust than making decisions based on the device model.
to get the device info..
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIDevice_Class/Reference/UIDevice.html
NSString *deviceType = [UIDevice currentDevice].model;
I think if you are just checking for GPS then you will need to access the CLLocationManager to see if it is on or off
I would like to know if it exists a way to check if device camera supports auto-focus ?
The only solution I found is to check device name in order to know if it supports auto-focus or not. But I did not like it because it did not work for future device.
Using the new AVFoundation APIs in iOS 4.0, you can check this by querying the AVCaptureDevice instance for the camera using its -isFocusModeSupported: method. The focus modes include AVCaptureFocusModeLocked, AVCaptureFocusModeAutoFocus, and AVCaptureFocusModeContinuousAutoFocus.
Is it possible to programmatically power off an iPhone or does Apple disallow this?
If Apple disallows this, is it possible to programmatically mute the sound on an iPhone?
The iPhone applications you create with the official SDK are sandboxes in and of themselves. Walled off sandboxes with barbed wire.
You won't be able to turn off the power. And muting sounds other than your own applications' sounds amounts to being able to turn off the iPod playback.
I don't have any evidence for that, but this would involve modifying the "UserExperience" - which is something that Apple never would allow (and why still many people jailbreak their phones).
And this involves "power off" as well as "mute sound" - because both could destroy the UX (you wait for an important call, but application X broke the sound).
Is it possible to programmatically power off apple iPhone or does apple dissalow this. If apple disallow this is it possible to programmatically mute the sound on iPhone?
Apple prevents you from affecting the functionality of other apps and the core phone functions. When in doubt, if you want to do something phone-wide, you can't.
Plus, to mute the phone, you'd also have to figure out some way of making the physical mute switch on the side of the phone match the phone's mute setting. That's not going to happen with software!
I'm not sure how powering down the device and muting the device are reasonable alternatives in your app, but the bottom line is that you can't power down the device. However, you can mute the sound of your own app or the iPod app using the MPMusicPlayerController class.
The code looks like this for your app:
MPMusicPlayerController *player = [MPMusicPlayerController applicationMusicPlayer];
player.volume = 0.0f;
And, this for the iPod:
MPMusicPlayerController *player = [MPMusicPlayerController iPodMusicPlayer];
player.volume = 0.0f;
Anything you do that affects anything external to your application wont make it through the approval process (besides push notifications). You can certainly mute the sound in your app by simply pausing, stopping, or setting the volume to zero for all sounds you are playing. If you mean make the phone be mute globally, no.
You can't turn the device off through software. You can set the music playback volume with the MPMusicPlayerController class, the docs suggest you can't change the volume of the
iPod player though.
I'm obviously not trying to play full spectrum audio, but is there some way to customize the iPhone/iTouch system alert sounds to play a little melody on the piezo speaker? The functionality is clearly present, so I guess the question is has Apple made it available for developer use...
Thanks,
-S
There are quite a few predefined sounds you can use in the 0-2000 range. For example, the keyboard click can be called like such:
AudioServicesPlayAlertSound(1104);
There is also a way to play a custom melody on the first-generation iPod touch, but it's not pretty.
It isn't. Sorry.
Only thing you can do from an application is this (you can use any SoundID for this, really):
AudioServicesPlayAlertSound(kSystemSoundID_Vibrate);
Discussion
Depending on the particular iPhone OS device, this function plays a short sound and may invoke vibration. Calling this function does the following on various iPhone OS devices:
iPhone—plays the specified sound and, if the user has configured the Settings application for vibration on ring, invokes vibration.
iPod touch, original—plays a short alert melody.
iPod touch, 2nd generation—plays the specified sound.