how to display the live website data in iPhone application - objective-c

I am newbie for iPhone application and I want to create iPhone application based on the website client have. What I want to do is show the Upcoming Courses from this website. Any idea how to do that?
Note that, the table that is there in section Upcoming Courses is static data and this site is created using Joomla. The web-developer do the changes in the Upcoming Courses section on a weekly basis depending on the courses.
Could anyone suggest me right path what needs to be done?
I also tried to search on google and found that RSS need to be created for that section. So I believe if I need to create RSS, then I would have to store this data in database. Isn't it? Is this only one way to deal with it?
My Client says, if they do the update in website, it should also get rectified in iPhone application too.

Look at the example right here:
https://github.com/greenisus/cocoa-rss
If you use Joomla, then you have a database already, of course.
I'm pretty sure that there are some sweet modules for RSS, which you can use.
Then you'd just have to parse them in your app.
There is no such thing as push in RSS, you'd have to consistently check and update your content.

Related

Trying to migrate online store,completely lost and being taken advantage of

We have an online store that used to be managed by a third party (lets call them BS Company) that did the hosting, webdesign and everything... Now we've decided to move to Shopify because this company has screwed us over in every step along the way.
We already have the store ready on Shopify. Our current website is hosted on DigitalOcean, for which BsCompany has all the access.
They are being impossible, saying that they can't transfer out of DigitalOcean because they have several client's sites with the same hosting. This sounds like royal BS. We just want to move everything to shopify.
I'm going to be on the phone with them shortly, I just want to be informed. What should I ask them to do specifically? What I'm I trying to get them to do?
I'm totally lost here guys, please help.
This goes outside of the scope of StackOveflow purpose which is to help developers with their code issues.
That said you are providing too little information here.
If you want to transfer your store to Shopify and the theme is already done then you need probably only the content from the old store.
Since you didn't mentioned what is the previous platform (WordPress/Drupal/Magento/etc...) it will be hard to provide a recommendation for an App that will import the content from the other platform to Shopify.
So pretty much you need to know what platform the current store is using. For example if you are using WordPress with WooCommerce you will need the following App in Shopify -> https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify/import-store-app/woocommerce-migration and you will need to export the content from the WordPress.
Please have in mind that this will focus mainly on the products, if you like to import the pages and custom post types ( we are still are talking about WordPress here ) you will need some other App or custom logic.
So long story short is not an easy job if there is no App for it.
If you want to keep the SEO for your previous site please have in mind that the Shopify have a predefined URL structure that you can't overwrite.
This means that pages that were using a specific url structure will be different now and you will need to create redirect rules in Shopify manually for each page, which will be a tedious process if you have too much content.
So pretty much you need to know:
What platform the site was written at
Export of the database ( and what database was used MySQL/MongoDB/etc... )
The site files ( they need to provide them to you )
With this information you will be able to create a local copy of the site for reference.

Need somewhere to post form responses

I am trying to work out where to put the responses to a GravityForm that I have hosted on WordPress. GravityForms displays them as entry/detail which is not a good way to see how many of x people there are etc.
I need an excel-esqe grid that can be edited by multiple users, so I was thinking Google docs, but I would rather keep the data on my server.
My end users are not particularly IT literate so the front end needs to be quite user friendly.
Is there any solution that I can host on my server and post data in to? I was playing with the idea of writing the form responses to a separate WordPress table but I need a very easy way to edit them.
I'd be grateful to hear any feedback or ideas you have
Manual data copy
EtherCalc is good. The problem is how to get the data in and out of the spreadsheet,
if a manual export and import will work, then you can use EtherCalc.
EtherCalc is a google docs style spreadsheet, edited by multiple users.
You can host it on your own server.
Pay a developer to automate
As above, but pay a developer to automate the movement of data. Would take a few days of work.
Google docs form
I saw a google docs forms plugin that does this already. Maybe you saw that already.
EtherCalc forms feature.
I will add a forms feature to EtherCalc over xmas.

Streaming movies from my server

I'm playing around to make an app that lets people stream cartoons that I make. It's a very simple app, one ImageView is just loading in a html-homepage in a UIWebView. Witch contain links to .mov files. So if you tap them a movie will start playing. This is because I just want to update the html-file with new cartoons every week.
Is this an "ok" way to do things code:ing-wise? Or am i obligated to us some Objective-c streaming functions?
Is there a specific file-type that i have to use in the movie-files on the server?
Is the HTML static in your app, or does it point to a server? If it's the former, you may be able to get the app approved doing it the way you suggested, depending on the reviewer. If it's the latter, you're unlikely to get it approved by apple.
They tend to frown upon web sites bundled into apps, and will tell you to simply make your website usable with the phone. See section 2.12.
My suggestion is to spend a bit more time and offer iOS users a better - and more immersive - experience than is available via the web. As I'm sure you've found, there are many built-in ways to stream movies and to present them in a manner that surpasses a web-page-like experience.

How to make a Tag cloud app that post on a website?

I want to make an app where the users can post messages that will be displayed on a website. The users would need to create a username and password to be able to post.
The app would be like a twitter, but only be able to post through the app and read the last few posts and not be able to write private messages.
The website would function like a huge cloud of thoughts where everyone could go and read what others have written. Once the post hit the cloud, they can't be deleted. Only me could delete posts.
All posts would have different color and font size, it would look like a huge tag cloud on the website.
How do I make an app and a website like this?
David H
The tutorial application for Google Application Engine is an unstyled version of what you describe. They'll even host it for you for free (up to a non-trivial level of usage).
The tag cloud creation is not so very hard but without knowing your preferred language it is hard to point you to helpful libraries (there are plenty out there).
Getting people to use it will be the hard part.
added in response to comment:
Good luck on your endeavor. I would be surprised if you weren't able to learn everything you need to know and have a working web app by the time school starts. I found a simple stand alone web cloud creation library that explains what it does and will run on GAE. So now even that part is in place for you.
I'm tempted to make some pathetic reference to the sorts of computing that I did prior to high school, but I expect that you probably have SD data cards have more computational power than I had available to me. Kids these days! ;)

How can I use Appstore API to get top100 list? What is the common architecture to build a appstore application website?

I've found a PDF file of Appstore search API, that I can use some parameters to fetch an application's detail information.(sorry I forgot the download url, but I found it in stackoverflow)
But there are so many sites that show you a Top100 list(like appshopper.com), and such as Mobclix.com also provide you the rank information.How can they do that? I didn't find the related API in the PDF file.
I also found an Appstore API by ABTO(http://www.abtollc.com/AppStoreAPI.aspx), but I really wanna do it by myself.
If I clear the 1st question, then I'd like to know the common architecture of building a website based on the appstore data. Do I need a database to cache the appstore's data, and create a batch to fetch the data frequently, execute like once per hour? I think it might not be clever to access the appstore for every user request, and may be there is a access limit of appstore?
Thanks for your help!
You can use the following link to generate a url for querying iTunes Data for things like the top 100 apps in a particular category.
http://itunes.apple.com/rss/generator/
For the top 100 free productivity apps the generated url is
http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/topfreeapplications/sf=143441/limit=100/genre=6007/xml
The PDF that you link to is very old and hasn't been updated in quite some time, but even if you did get that working, it doesn't have "Top 100" selections (to my knowledge).
1.The way people do to get information from the AppStore is to parse the Xml returned from ITunes web call, and get the information they want. There's no official api release from apple.
You may be right, its more clever to save a copy of app information on your server.