Does iOS 6 provide a way for developers to copy its user interface, i.e. if I want my app to look like iTunes or the App Store, can I easily do that using the SDK or do I have to design that on my own?
There is no way you implement this. If you take a loot at the file system, you will see that the UI is actually images that Apple uses. You will have to roll your own, but I am sure sooner or later there will be similar images for you to use on the internet. You can then use UIAppearance proxy to set the look and feel to be as similar to Apple's as possible.
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This is my first post.
I have some experience in developing Shiny web apps and I want to do a project where the user can take a picture with their phone, write a short summary of the image and then upload it so that it is accessible to other users who can also upload. I am wondering if this is feasible in R or should I learn another language? If so, which do you recommend and where should I start? Thanks in advance.
Your project does not seem to make use of any strong property of the R language and its ecosystem (vectorization, advanced statistics, grammar of graphics, functional programming).
Thus, it does not seem to be a good fit here.
Shiny is just a wrapper around JavaScript to make websites hosted on a computer server which can be accessed by any device using a browser. There is shinywebcam, which might work on mobile browsers, but the calculation is done on the hosting server and not the phone itself, so it's not an app traditionally.
We about to build a mobile app which displays static content made up of text, images and videos. For what it’s worth, it’s a social enterprise in the field of mental health.
We want the content displayed in the app to be driven by a CMS, so that it is easy to collaborate and update the content without needing to release an app update. Normally I would just set up something like Django and expose the content via some REST endpoints.
However we’re keen to build a really great offline app experience, so the app is going to need a cache of this content one way or another.
I’ve been looking at Realm, Firestore and AppSync which all seem brilliant in many ways, but I’m wondering whether they are overkill for something like this, as really what we need is just uni-directional sync, not the bi-directional magic they provide. I’m also slightly nervous about using something that isn’t as mainstream as REST (we once built something using Parse.. before Facebook shut it down).
My question is therefore are there any simple, widely used, reliable technologies or design patterns which solve the problem of syncing a cloud CMS into a mobile app data store
?
We are looking to develop an application wherein the requirement is such that we need some help on designing the architecture. I am putting down below the requirements of the application.
Brief Description
1) The application shall work on web + Android + Offline desktop version (Offline version meaning entirely offline environment wherein full functionality shall work without internet)
if possible offline android as well (which as per my research is difficult to do in same backend so caching can be used for temporary offline usage)
2) While designing the architecture we want to minimise the rework such that we shall be able to use the same Database, Logic code and Frontend as much as possible
3) Everytime application is updated then web and android will reflect it immediately due to API integration. And for offline application, we want to update the logic and database everytime it connects to internet.
Challenges I am facing
1) Database choice : Since it has to be an offline solution as well, I understand that we will have to use either SQLite or SQL compact edition so that we can use the free version and installation file is also not very big
2) Logic : Due to offline requirement, we may have to put entire logic in Asp.net / (any other suggestions) since stored procedures are not supported in above mentioned databases
Some links I found regarding this :
https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/346702/How-to-make-work-an-Online-Web-application-Offline
3) Application framework : Which framework MVC / MVVM etc would be suitable to minimise the work for web based and offline app.
4) Frontend : I understand that we will have to make different screens for web and android. However want to know whether we can use HTML 5 (cache feature) or Angular JS which can be used in offline environment as well or do we have to make offline screens seperately?
Build an ASP.Net web app with offline functionality
https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/
5) Can apache cordova be used in someway for better architecture (I dont know much about it hence)
6) I am sure I might be missing something. If you can offer some suggestion on best way to go about developing this application then will really appreciate your help
Your requirements are not very clear to me.
But if i have backend which is catering to multiple clients with different devices.
I will take the following strategy.
I will expose the backend functionality through rest/HTTP and let the clients consume them.
If i want to make the same UI and functionality and want to do it quickly for different mobile platforms. i will go for a Cordova,Phonegap or a Xamarin app. But keep it in mind that they lack some native functionality.
For web i will go with a UI framework which is device screen size responsive like like openUI5 ( i am sure there are dozen others ), such that an user can open the application in a web browser in any device and it gets rendered easily.
For Desktop based apps again i have to develop a separate UI. If you again have multiple flavors in Desktop application like Windows , Mac etc. You can take multiple strategies like Have a common Java layer + Minimal native layers for each OS or having full blown native layers or have the logic exposed as API in a low level language as C++ and then let high level languages consume them.
For all the apps you can use DBs like SQLite . Have the common DB and scripts ready which easily replicate the table structure for you.
Determination of a technology for the backend can be upto you (depending upon your requirements) and should not matter to clients if you expose your functionality in a restful manner.
Hope this helps.
Best Regards,
Saurav
I am building my app in phonegap. In that app I am calling my wordpress website like window.location="http://www.example.com/";.
Because of window.location my app UI and mobile browser UI are looks same. So I want to detect phonegap app to defer from browser UI. Is there any way to do this.
#JayTh
Okay. Thanks. VERY GOOD TO KNOW. I spend hours getting beginners to understand issues. You got them.
Okay, once you load a webpage from a website you are NOT allowed to access any of the Cordova Plugin APIs. However, you can access HTML5 API, like camera and geolocation. Again, you cannot access any of the Cordova Plugin APIs, and any of the 800+ 3rd-party APIs.
The best way to access the web, is via inAppBrowser. However, the third paragraph states:
The InAppBrowser window behaves like a standard web browser, and can't access Cordova APIs. For this reason, the InAppBrowser is recommended if you need to load third-party (untrusted) content, instead of loading that into the main Cordova webview.
Apple is serious about their security, so if they detect you are going around this, they may reject your App. Just to be clear on this, there is a new security protocol, which Phonegap Build now requires, and so does Apple. With Phonegap Build, it will create the required Apple ATS entries into the Info.plist.
So, the best I can do at this point is give you three (3) links.
Top Mistakes by Developers new to Cordova/Phonegap
Core Plugins Setup
HOW TO apply the Cordova/Phonegap the whitelist system
On 1., you have hit #5 When designing the app, thinks phonegap works like a website or webbrowser.. For the remainder, I recommend just reading the bold sentences.
On 2., if you want to use the Cordova Plugins, it is best to use the version numbers, if not you will get the latest, and your code may break. This is because now, Phonegap Build now uses NPM for the plugins. And many times bugs fixes get into the plugin, that require the latest compiler - and Phonegap Build is always at least one version behind.
On 3., You'll need to use the whitelist to apply the fixes that maybe required for any new plugins you are using.
If you have more questions, I can answer them in comments. If it get too complicate, we can move to Google Group of Cordova/Phonegap - Best of Luck.
I am considering creating a website with the complexity of Facebook that should be able to scale into the millions of users. My question is: Is there any reason not to use Adobe Flex for such large project apart from the obvious point of requiring everyone to have Flash installed and not having to rely on Adobe? In my view Adobe Flex would reduce the server load for Facebook, because more of the work could me done on the client side. Do you agree?
Of course Facebook could have been implemented in Flash. But then the question is would it have succeeded? There are reasons big web companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo only use Flash as sparingly as possible.
The thing I would fear most is alienating users. The Flash plugin isn't the best piece of software out there. It is slow and likely to crash once in a while. If your app gets bigger you might get some loading times that might not be acceptable to your users. Also in my opinion full Flash sites just don't feel right because they behave differently from HTML websites. All great websites like Google, Flickr, Stackoverflow or Facebook feel very light and slick which is very elegant makes up for great usability.
And then HTML and JavaScript are a lot more flexible. Do you want your website to be available on smartphonse? The iPhone has no Flash and even with phones that do you have the problem that users will very likely hate a full Flash site since those phones don't necessarily scale Flash as nicely as they scale HTML and Flash draws battery like crazy. If someone comes up with another revolution like smartphones you can be sure it supports HTML and JavaScript but you can't be so sure about Flash.
Then the question is how would you gain any efficiency? Of course you can write your UI with Flex and just call very lightweight webservices like you would use them for AJAX and you can even cache some of the content of the site locally so that you don't transmit more data as necessary for user interaction (the UI is transmitted only once). But you can also do that with JavaScript. You can write your UI in HTML and JavaScript, load it once and then just pull the naked JSON data from the servers and render it using JavaScript. You can also fetch lots of this data in advance to get the number of requests down. But still such an approach has its cons. Did you ever notice that when you type an answer on stackoverflow and someone else submits an answer you get notified while typing your answer. Such real time features are very cool and you might want this at some point in time which means more server interaction.
But whatever you do your servers still have to scale if your site grows. Even if you minimize the number of GET requests that hit your servers they will still grow a lot when your site gets popular and you will need a lot of servers to handle you will just improve your users/servers ratio.
The most interesting point though is that Flex is much easier to program than AJAX (think about browser incompatibilities for instance) and still AJAX was not only invented but the whole world messes with all those problems that come with it instead of using Flex. I think this tells a lot about of the value of the result you get when creating a full website in Flash.
Go to facebook and do view source...do you see all that JavaScript? That all runs client side
Johannes is right to point out the difference for server vs. client. The server side stuff is what needs to scale.
As an example, the Microsoft Silverlight team has assembled a facebook client app in silverlight (using the Facebook public API). My point is, using todays technologies, it is entirely possible to write a web application targeting many different kinds of client technologies: classic web browsers (HTML/javascript), 'rich internet applications' (flex, silverlight), ...
See also the myriad of Twitter clients out there.
The company I work for has a large app in Flash that is used by Governments. It is very hard to maintain and does fail sometimes. The problem is all of the .fla and .as files that have to be altered just to make a small change. Yes, the app could have been built better but even so, it is still harder to maintain than an HTML/JavaScript front end.
While I love writing Flash/Flex apps, I believe they should complement a site and not be the site.
Using a good JavaScript framework like jQuery takes the Browser compatibility question out of the picture (for the most part) and allows a lot of functionality.
Flex is the GUI for the client. You still need server-side storage and that's what has to scale. The user interface could be in Flex, while most of your users won't like such interfaces.
You will have to do a custom version of your site for the iPad/iPhone.
There are other ways of moving load to the client side. Javascript will give you porting headaches, but less than moving away from the entire architecture like Flex.
OTOH when you get a million users you'll have the resources to reimplement your site.
I don't think you would see a performance advantage with a site like Facebook, because the content is highly dynamic, comes from many different places, and is created by many independent entities. Flash (and therefore Flex) is better for monolithic apps from a single source that don't need to change very often.
The default in Flash is to build everything into a single .swf file that holds everything. It is possible to break out of this default behavior, of course. You can make web service calls, pull in external components via the SWC mechanism, load static content via HTTP, etc. Nevertheless, it's not the default pattern, which affects how Flash development libraries and tools work. Besides, the more of this you do, the less of the "run everything we possibly can on the client side" benefit you get. It gets soaked up in HTTP connection overhead.
The default on the plain old standards-based web is to store all assets separately and assemble them dynamically at the client. This is one reason the web is slow -- again, all that HTTP connection overhead -- but also why it is flexible and dynamic. It mates well with a site like Facebook which requires constant evolution by a lot of independent developers.
I say this having developed a Flex app, which I am happy with. Only one person -- me -- has to maintain it, and it's naturally a monolithic app. It plays right into Flex's strengths.