I've looked all over and found nothing about this topic - For people making mobile app games and want to sell levels or potions or whatnot from within the app, is this supported on Flex mobile apps? Are there plans to introduce it? I've found info about advertisement implementation... is this a possible next step? Do you have to use something like PayPal instead of Android Market?
Sorry if this has been asked, but I haven't found anything yet.
Thanks!
I know Adobe said at GDC Conference they are in the process of analyzing requirements to make in-app purchases available via Flash Player API. It's almost a year so far since that announcement but there has not been any further news. The work around/the way most client-server implement these business rule is on the server-side where they implement an entitlements model.
Yes, there are several native extensions that implement this functionality.
I have been using the ones from Milkman Games with good results, and the support is fantastic. No financial association, just a very satisfied user.
There is also a free iOS Storekit ANE as well, although in my experience with it there are still some bugs, notably with blank receipt values for restored transactions: http://code.google.com/p/in-app-purchase-air-ios/
Note: implementing your own entitlements is ill-advised for various reasons:
Apple doesn't allow using anything other than their own in-app
purchase API on iOS.
The various store implementations (well, Apple's
and Amazon's at least, Google Play is another story) handle all of
the details of international purchases and localized pricing for
you.
The store implementations handle payments, subscriptions, durable purchases, and a host
of other details that you will spend a lot of time getting right on your own.
Related
What costs are involved with developing and/or releasing a Google Assistant App?
eg: Can you develop an app using DialogFlow and a backend (say Firebase) without having to pay while you learn?
First of all - you don't need to use Dialogflow or Firebase to develop your action. Both are suggested, but neither are required. You can use any NLP you want, or none at all if you use the Actions SDK (but you want an NLP). You can use any backend at all, including running it off your local machine and tunneling to it via ngrok, but you don't want to do that for production.
But, during development (and even during a light deployment before your action becomes massively popular and a stand-out hit), you have lots of solutions that will be free.
Dialogflow is free for use with the Google Assistant. Period. There is an Enterprise edition which offers additional services and support for a cost, but you won't need them. There are restrictions, but you won't bump into them until you hit 3 requests per second - which you shouldn't during development.
Firebase's free tier (the Spark Plan) is good for very simple experimentation, but once you start doing network calls to outside Google's network (if you are trying to call the network API for other services), you will be blocked. No worries! The "Blaze Plan" paid tier does require a way to bill you, but they don't start billing you until you get quite a bit of usage: 2 million function calls / month and similarly scaled usage of CPU, memory, and network. So even the "Blaze Plan" will be free during development (and for basic usage).
Updated, December 2020
Things have changed a bit since the original answer was posted, but the underlying basics remain true - there is no charge to develop for Actions on Google.
Dialogflow now has an "Essentials" edition and a more advanced "CX" edition. While you can still use both to build Actions, they're not really intended for this purpose anymore.
Instead, Google has included the Actions Builder into the Actions Console to handle the NLP work. The Actions SDK works with this, but can also just pass along all the STT information to your webhook. Both are also free to use.
Dialogflow is for free if you don't use it as an enterprise:
https://dialogflow.com/pricing/
And Firebase free tier should be enough if you not using firebase
already for other projects. enter link description here
But of course you have to calculate your own time so in case of the
spent time probably not.
For everything else yes it is, as long as you not using it already somewhere. You can for development also host your server local and use an ngrok tunnel as sever address for Dialogflow.
As an addition to shortQuestion's answer:
The free plan in Firebase should be enough if you're just using it for learning and developing apps for personal use. If you want to go a bit further you'll need to upgrade the plan.
You can sign up with a free trial for actions on Google to get 300$ of credits during a 12 month period which would be more than enough to do anything you want.
The costs of Firebase/Actions on Google on a higher plan aren't anything to worry about though, you'd be talking about a few cent per multiple hundred thousand requests.
I am using Datazen as my BI presentation layer. Since Datazen analysis comments does not support for Web browsing (as I know only support for mobile app). Is there any API we can call and send comments ?
No, Datazen does not offer any public APIs.
This is a feature request I've heard before (in one form or another), but yeah, unfortunately there's no known workaround either.
I'd keep an eye on product updates, and especially SSRS 2016 Mobile Reports. If the product team does choose to implement any APIs like this, that's where they'd go.
My employer has recently switched to using Skype for Business. Aside from a somewhat painful user experience on the Mac, its not so bad. However, several of us have noticed that certain employees can join meetings without being listed amongst the attendees. I don't mean anonymously- I mean the attendee count doesn't even register the additional bodies.
Is this some kind of audit feature that allows certain users the ability to secretly join a meeting? Or perhaps its just a feature that allows someone to slip in late without disturbing the flow? Or maybe just a bug?
I don't mean to sound paranoid but this activity only seems to occur for division heads, which is why several of us have taken notice.
The short answer is yes.
But "normal" people can't do it directly, as the only type of participant that can be hidden is a UCMA trusted application, using a trusted application endpoint.
For "normal" Skype clients to connect hidden, is to connect to a UCMA trusted application endpoint that does a B2BUA call into the conference.
You can see an example of this in Microsoft's UCMA reference Call Center application.
I've been reading about Firebase and playing with it for a short while. The idea (BAAS) and implementation are impressive, and having programmed with Javascript it seems a viable choice. Not having to deal with scaling and other server side concerns makes it even more attractive.
My question is: generally speaking, is Firebase a first class back-end candidate for any average data-based application? e.g. billing, CRM, e-commerce, social, location based, etc. I do not include super light or heavy extremes such as a basic chat, or a nuclear plant monitor...
The answer may not be a clear yes/no, but was it built to support the general application space, or just stand out as a real-time read/write data service?
Would appreciate answers based on experience and existing production applications.
Thanks
Yes, Firebase is intended to be a first class back-end for any data based Web, iOS or Android application. The service offers real-time data reads and writes, but also comes with a powerful and flexible security system that allows you to write secure client-only apps, without needing any server code to enforce data boundaries.
There are several apps in production listed on the front page as customer and on the app showcase page on https://firebase.google.com/customers/
Firebase is now more capable and is considered as a full stand-alone back-end, especially after the introduction of cloud function. https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/
Firebase may not have support for transaction spanning multiple business objects.
e.g. When a sales order is booked then it needs to update inventory for multiple items, update billing in receivables, give sales credit to multiple sales persons etc.
Firebase team is supposed to come up with a database trigger option which will make all these happen.
We have a very basic application (iOS/Android) done in Appcelerator that will receive a single update every week. This update will be sent to all the users subscribed to the push notifications service.
By this moment, we have around 35k installs but 7,000 active users on this application on last month. We've been evaluating two services for all the push notifications:
StackMob
Parse
Appcelerator Cloud services is fine, but we're not willing to pay that much. Parse and StackMob prices are lower than Appcelerator Cloud services and by our analysis, we could even use the free service on both services (StackMob = 60k push notifications + 60k api calls, and Parse 1M api calls + 1M pushes).
If we're going to use Parse, we'll need to buy the Android and iOS module from the Marketplace ($30/year each). Which is fine. On the counterpart, I think we could use the REST API on StackMob for subscribing to the push service.
Questions:
What are your thoughts on both services? Which one do you prefer and why?
Have you used StackMob REST API for subscribing to push notifications?
How do you retrieve Android's token?
Is there any (cost effective) alternative to these services? I also reviewed PubNub, which seems to be great but costs are higher than StackMob and Parse.
Thanks in advance.
Update
I asked the same question on Appcelerator forums. After a while, users came back with several answers and users using Parse.com for this.
I ended implementing Parse.com, which was really simple by using the Android and iOS plugins that are on the Appcelerator Market.
I wanted to chime in and point you to some StackMob references around Appcelerator.
Aaron Saunders has several projects on github showing how to use StackMob with Appcelerator.
https://github.com/aaronksaunders
He also wrote a series of blog posts about it.
http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2011/11/titanium-appcelerator-quickie-stackmob-api-module-part-one.html
Our REST API reference is available at https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/dashboard/REST-API-Reference
One of the big differentiators between StackMob and others is our custom code option. You can write your own logic in Java, Scala or Clojure and host it on StackMob. The custom code can interact with your user data and other 3rd party APIs.
https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/custom%20code
I haven't used those services myself, so I cant comment. However, Another alternative we use (and have been pretty happy with) is Urban Airship. It's relatively cost effective, supports Android, iOS and BB and it has server side libraries for a bunch different languages. There is also a neat blog post outlining how to easily do device registration (at least for iOS) via simple web requests in Appcelerator.
The blog post on its Appcelerator integration is here.