I want to change the name of my app on iTunes when I release the next version, I know how to do this and am set to go but I am not sure what impact this might have on my app as it appears in the search results and leader boards/app ranking.
The original app name includes a brief description of the game. I want to remove the description and just leave the two-word app name which will be the same as before.
Are there any reasons I should avoid changing the app name?
An app name is a great opportunity for an app marketer to get more "keyword space". Your keywords are limited to 100 characters, putting more "info" in the app name will get your app to appear on more searches (When the additional information in the app name doesn't match the keywords)
From a branding/design perspective, adding more info/words to the app name is not really "sexy". The rule of thumb here is to keep it short and simple (and recognizable).
So it really depends what your goal is. If the brief description has some really nice additional "keywords" in it, I would keep them, they will bring you search traffic.
Side note: We have different apps (~10), where we tried both short vs. long (= with description) app name and it brought us additional traffic, but the description has to have really good phrases in it. Therefore you can see it at the moment as additional space for keywords. (BTW: Same goes for In-App-Purchase Titles/Names: They are indexed like app names and can get you appear on additional search terms.)
Related
I need to use themoviedb.org for one of the apps I am working on. For using the API, I need an API key. How do I get an API key on themoviedb.org?
I found this in the forum:
You can request an API key by clicking on the "API" link from within your account page on the left hand sidebar. See here
In terms of making things faster for people, the URL for application is here these days (Under Account>Settings>API as previously mentioned): https://www.themoviedb.org/settings/api
You'll want to start with a Developer key as wait time for a Developer key is zero (immediate). A commercial key, as far as I understand it, is only appropriate once the app is developed and running. Turnaround for a commercial API key is about 3 days-ish though obviously could vary.
Once you have a key, inside the doco pages there's a "Try It Out" tab which lets you do calls. The normal code flow (for getting movie details) would be something like:
Get Configuration (needed for image paths, should be cached)
Search Movies (returns a list, find the numeric id for the one you want in the list returned). Be aware there might be duplicates returned - you can use the year of release, title and language to find the one you want.
Get Movie Details with the movie numeric ID, with "append_to_response" of "credits,images,trailers" so that actors, writers, directors, and trailers (aka videos) are returned.
Check doco for how to find the actual image paths, using configuration values fetched above. It's generally considered courteous to copy the images you want to use to your own server rather than serving them from TMDB's server.
I am currently developing a voIP app and I am really stuck with the address book.
Because of the custom design, the native address book does not fit in my app. Besides, I want to add some extra data not present in the native address book. But this is leading into some problems which I've separated into two sections:
1. Data structures:
In a section of my app I need to show to the user all his address book contacts with additional information (if the user has the same app and it's online, for example).
Right now I'm getting all the info from the Address Book api and loading it in an array directly (which is accessed by the tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:), but not displaying the custom information I was talking about. I don't know if its worthwhile to store all the address book info in a sqlite data base (where I'd be able to add the extra information easily) or if I should store only that extra information in a file or something.
The biggest problem of storing it in a data base is that the contact's picture is heavy enough to get a wasting-memory data base. I thought to store only a reference (the ABRecordID) and then to gather the related info from the address book instead of the data base, but the Apple documentation of the Address Book api says the ABRecordID is not guaranteed to remain the same, so it could cause my data to appear next to wrong contact data.
Any idea?
2. Performance:
The second big problem with this custom address book is that... the iOS table views are too 'manual' compared to the Android ones, for example. You need to have the data stored somewhere so that when the tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: method gets called you return that data. You can also load that data inside this method, but this makes it very slow.
The problem here is that preloading all the data in memory is dangerous, because a person may have 40 contacts or 2000 (and maybe he/she has taken a picture for each of them, which will be much more memory-consuming). If the iOS device runs out of memory the system will kill the app. The data base approach has no memory problems, but making queries for each cell to appear is so slow that it becomes unacceptable.
Again, I need ideas for this. Can't find a tradeoff between performance and memory consumption.
Please, don't ask for code because I'm not allowed to post it. I'd really appreciate your advices. Thank you in advance!
Data structures:
Along with the recordref you should store the name phone number and email address. Nothing else in your data store. If one of the three vales change and the other two remain the same update the changed value. The recordref can change during a restore of a device for many users at once but the name email and phone won't. If the user changes a name or email or phone they won do it across many users at once. Once in a while you end up with a recordref that does not match up with email and phone say, the contact may have changed employers so then show a list of close matches and ask the user to select one.
As far as some one having 1000s of contact I would use paging. Load 100 or 200 at a time in to an array with current row displayed in the table view as middle of your array index. Once the user scrolls 20-30 records update the records in your array from address book. Your going to be spending a lot time resaving data just to go through the collection comparing and trying to keep it up to date. You should be able to store quite a few records long as your not keeping the user images in memory, for that you should let the table view handle it. Get image and assign to cell when you get the notification about the cell about to become visible. Even then I would put a short wait before loading the image, because if the user is scrolling fast the cell will just fly by and you'll get notified that the cell scrolled out and you can release the image data. If the user is scrolling slowly then the short wait/sleep will pass and the image should show up for each cell.
I don't know how much meta your planning on storing in your app wrapping the contacts but if you should create two tables for the contact object, one with 3-4 indexed columns that will allow for faster querying and a second to hold the rest that loaded only when users viewing the contact in a detail view. Can't get too much into a tableviescell, unless your on the iPad.
Hope that helps.
I am working on an outdoor site and letting users enter the types of things they saw when they are outdoors. Obviously any item can be written in a large number of ways.
For example, the animal "coyote" can be written like this:
coyote,
wolf,
coyotes,
wild coyotes,
cayotees
So if I let users enter data, how can I have the system understand that all the above examples are about something classified as a "coyote" ?
Why don't you try to rely on Google Sets for each new entry then create links with already existing matched entries in your system ?
You could even crowdsource the validity checking of the links by adding a "Report non related" function.
There are various (non offical) versions of Google Set API.
I have 2 1/2 years experience of VB.Net, mostly self taught, so please bear with me if I seem rather noobish still and do not know some of the basics. I would recommend you grab a cup of tea before starting on this, as it appears to have got quite long...
I currently have a rather large application (VB.Net website) of over 15000 lines of code at the last count. It does not do retail or anything particularly complex like that - it is literally just a wholesale viewing website with admin frontend, catalogue / catalogue management system and pageview system.
I don't really know much about how .Net applications work in the background - whether they are all loaded on the same thread or if each has its own thread... I just know how to code them, or at least like to think I do... :-)
Basically my application is set up as follows:
There are two different areas - the customer area and the administration frontend.
The main part of the customer frontend is the Catalogue. The MasterPage will load a list of products but that's all, and this is common to all the customer frontend pages.
I tend to work on only one or several parts of the application at a time before uploading the changes. So, for example, I may alter the hierarchy of the Catalogue and change the Catalogue page to match the hierarchy change whilst leaving everything else alone.
The pageview database is getting really quite large and so it is getting rather slow when the application is first requested due to the way it works.
The application timeout is set to 5 minutes - don't know how to change it, I have even tried asking this question on here and seem to remember the solution was quite complex and I was recommended not to change it, but if a customer requests the application 5 minutes after the last page view then it will reload the application from scratch. This means there is a very slow page load whenever it exceeds 5 minutes of inactivity.
I am not sure if this needs consideration to determine how best to split the application up, if at all, but each part of the catalogue system is set up as follows:
A Manager class at the top level, which is used by the admin frontend to add, edit and remove items of the specified type and the customer frontend to retrieve a list of items of the specified type. For example the "RangeManager" will contain a list of product "Ranges" and will be used to interact with these from the customer frontend.
An Item class, for example Range, which contains a list of Attributes. For example Name, Description, Visible, Created, CreatedBy and so on. The form for adding / editing loops through these to display relevant controls for the administrator. For example a Checkbox for BooleanAttribute.
An Attribute class, which can be of type StringAttribute, BooleanAttribute, IntegerAttribute and so on. There are also custom Attributes (not just datatypes) such as RangeAttribute, UserAttribute and so on. These are given a data field which is used to get a piece of data specific to the item it is contained in when it is first requested. Basically the Item is given a DataRow which is stored and accessed by Attributes only when they are first requested.
When one item is requested from a specific manager is requested, the manager will loop through all the items in the database and create a new instance of the item class. For example when a Range is requested from the RangeManager, the RangeManager will loop through all of the DataRows in the Ranges table and create a new instance of Range for each one. As stated above it simply creates a new instance with the DataRow, rather than loading all the data into it there and then. The Attributes themselves fetch the relevant data from the DataRow as and when they're first requested.
It just seems a tad stupid, in my mind, to recompile and upload the entire application every time I fix a minor bug or a spelling mistake for a word which is in the code behind (for example if I set the text of a Label dynamically). A fix / change to the Catalogue page, the way it is now, may mean a customer trying to view the Contact page, which is in no way related to the Catalogue page apart from by having the same MasterPage, cannot do so because the DLL is being uploaded.
Basically my question is, given my current situation, how would people suggest I change the architecture of the application by way of splitting it into multiple applications? I mean would it be just customer / admin, or customer / admin and pageviews, or some other way? Or not at all? Are there any other alternatives which I have not mentioned here? Could web services come in handy here? Like split the catalogue itself into a different application and just have the masterpage for all the other pages use a web service to get the names of the products to list on the left hand side? Am I just way WAY over-complicating things? Judging by the length of this question I probably am, and it wouldn't be the first time... I have tried to keep it short, but I always fail... :-)
Many thanks in advance, and sorry if I have just totally confused you!
Regards,
Richard
15000 LOC is not really all that big.
It sounds like you are not pre-compiling your site for publishing. You may want to read this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1y1404zt(v=vs.80).aspx
Recompiling and uploading the application is the best way to do it. If all you are changing is your markup, that can be uploaded individually (e.g. changing some html layout in an aspx page).
I don't know what you mean here by application timeout, but if your app domain recycles every 5 minutes, then that doesn't seem right at all. You should look into this.
Also, if you find yourself working on various different parts of the site (i.e. many different changes), but need to deploy only some items in isolation, then you should look into how you are using your source control tools (you are using one, aren't you?). Look into something like GIT and branching/merging.
Start by reading:
Application Architecture Guide
I run a site where users have their own profile pages. They are also able to post products for sale (that they have made) and write/import blog posts. I am going to be implementing a sitemap and I need to make a final decision with the URL strategy.
Here's what I currently have for products (where 1234 is the product ID that I use to lookup that product):
N.B "product" is a fixed string (although it's another word in the actual site) - all others are dynamic depending on the item.
example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name
should I change to any of these? i.e:
example.com/maker/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/1234/product-category/product-name
The main items for consideration are:
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
I think the first example (example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name) is the best format but I would consider changing then "." to "-". I am just thinking that if somehow a product name ends in something that triggers an different handler on your server like ".php" or ".jsp" you might have some undesired effects.
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
I don't really think it matters too much where the product ID goes but as far as the user reading it, I think they pay attention to the end of the line so I would put the ID first leaving the most descriptive part (the product name) at the end.
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Not sure if you allow your users to change user names, but if you did I would leave the user name out. An example would be someone getting married and changing their last name. This would hurt your SEO since the URL would change but search engines would have already indexed it the old way. You'd have to put some permantent redirects in place to handle this which could be avoided by just leaving the username out.
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
You should leave the ID in the URL in the event that two products have the same name and your algorithm to generate the URL creates a duplicate link.
I prefer this:
example.com/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
However, one should be aware that the url gets too long some times. It is difficult to represent or promote in a blog or a forum. Why not simply use
example.com/1234 and use the Title to put the other details like category and product name?
Now a days, I think search engines are getting smarter and short urls are used more and more.