How would you use Obj-c to search the Apple App store to do the following...
Return the details of the top 100 in the games overall category or a
specific games category
Return the details of a specific games in the games category
Anyone?
Well, as far as I know you have two methods to search the App Store:
Search API;
RSS feed generator.
There are many differences between those but the most relevant for your example is that with the Search API you cannot sort the results as they come sorted by relevance and it requires always a search term. The RSS feed generator already has Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing categories for you.
Given this I'm going to start answering your question for the RSS feed generator.
You use the RSS feed generator to generate feeds like this for the top 100 free games in the US store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topfreeapplications/limit=100/genre=6014/xml;
Take a loot at this link to get games sub genres;
You use NSXMLParser library to parse the RSS which already includes the app details.
You may use the initWithContentsOfUrl: method of NSXMLParser;
A quick how-to for this part can be found here.
You can also use StoreKit to get the details of the apps by their ID or show a modal view controller with a specific app but that will require an extra network request.
For the sake of completeness I'll also cover how you can use the Search API.
Use the Search API to create a URL that describes your search:
A URL like this allow you to search for apps with that matches "angry birds" - https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=angry+birds&media=software.
Process the results using NSJSONSerialization library. That already includes the app details.
Take a loot at this tutorial on how to use the NSJSONSerialization library.
In the end, as #Numan said, this two methods accomplish different things. You said you wanted to have the top 100 games from a specific category and also said you needed to search for a specific game.
You can use my descriptions to create one class that interacts with the App Store in these two ways and return an object defined by you that describes an app (or an array of objects).
You can access this info by RSS, look here http://www.apple.com/rss/
Also you can generate RSS feed http://itunes.apple.com/rss/generator/
Related
Context
I am in the process of providing some consultancy on doing a HTTP GET using YouTube Data API V3; in order to develop a Windows based application to GET a list of results from Youtube, for say a specific CATEGORY, or a specific TAG.
We are open to using any programming language(I'm from a C++ background and am hoping You tube will support direct HTTP connections without using Google client SDK and so on) to connect to YouTube and (HTTP) GET data.(Once a month or so, so YouTube API quotas should not be problem).
The Issue
We are being told by some of my client's web developers that YouTube API v3 will only return a maximum of 500 records/results, for say a query that returns JUST the Total viewers, the Video's link, and basic meta data such as that.
S, say I wish to find 5,000 results for category "House music" or "basketball" - and I have the Developer Key etc are all set up, would that be possible?
If so, what GET fields would I need to populate(such as "max_results_per_page")?
Thank you.
The API won't provide more than ~500 search results for any arbitrary query. It's by design. Technically, it means that the nextPageToken field won't be returned once you hit ~500 results. No additional parameter can change that.
If you want more than ~500 results for a query, you have to split it into more specific sub-queries. I'd suggest using the publishedAfter and publishedBefore parameters to achieve that, but feel free to experiment with the other ones here.
This only holds for the search-Query. Other queries like "PlaylisItem:list" deliver more results. I have tested with 100.000 items to get the videos of a playlist.
I'm running a contest on the web where the image with the most likes wins. It's tiresom having to go through 900 images manually so what I want to do is, sort all images with the tag lets say #computer after the amount of likes, with the most liked pics on top. I have searched the net like crazy for some program or site that does this (ExtraGram, gramhoot, statigram, webstagram) but none offer to sort by amount of likes and it drives me INSANE! It's a really relevant request.
I've tried istafeed.js but it doesn't include all images, actually it leaves out the ones with the moest likes which defies the purpose.
There's nothing I know of in the Instagram API that sends back media sorted by likes in advance. I don't think there's a tool to do this either, but writing one is relatively simple IMO and I've done it before for a contest specifically.
The simplest thing to do is to do the following:
Use the Instagram API (via a library or pure REST) to query by tag. For instance, if you only care about the most recently tagged media or you want to process by date, you can use the [/tag/tag-name/media/recent][1] enpoint.
Page through each result page by processing the next_max_id/next_max_tag_id.
Collect the results locally into a database. You will receive the "like" count for each media item. You will have to update the data if you want to track the likes over time.
Sort the results using your database or if it's a small result set, you could skip #3 and just sort in memory.
If you need to refresh the results, you need to subscribe to the Tag via the API. You can give Instagram a URL to then push updates, and then you'll have to retrieve 1 or media items and update them in your database accordingly.
You will of course need to register your application with Instagram to get an API key if you want to do this. Then you can either send them your client_id or use OAuth.
The best way to achieve this is to pull the photos in and then sort them programmatically based on the likes numeric value. I've designed a plugin that does this automatically for you for anyone interested.
Instagram Journal
Is there any way to get random article of specific wikimedia portal using wikimedia API?
For example, I need random page of Portal:Science.
Does anyone know how to do this?
What you're asking for doesn't make much sense, because a portal doesn't have a list of pages associated with it.
The closest thing you can do is to get a random page from e.g. Category:Science or one of its subcategories. There is no way to do that directly using the API, you would need to traverse all the subcategories and choose a random page from them by yourself.
There is a tool that already does this (with a limit on the depth of the category tree): erwin85's random article and there is also a template for it on the English Wikipedia.
I am getting a collection of photos via this flickr API:
description: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.tags.getClusterPhotos.html
example: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/flickr.tags.getClusterPhotos
I see no option to include the license parameter on the API query and I thus get copyrighted images returned, which I do not want. I see that I can get the license info by calling flickr.photos.getInfo on each individual image, but this will be quite time consuming. Are there any other methods to get a collection of photos from a tag cluster with a particular license?
License is one of the parameters listed in their api here:
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
I would try just using the id's from the results listed here in their return:
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo.html
for example:
&license=4
It may be better to use "flickr.photos.search" instead. You can search for a specific tag and license (there is no need to do a second call on each image).
https://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/flickr.photos.search
We would like to be able to pull out certain places from foursquare an categorize them on our website along with comments from foursquare users. I have the following questions:
1- Can we pull out places and categorize them the way we want on our website? e.g: restaurants/bar/lounge/club/landmarks/others.
2- can we pull out as well phone numbers (when available) and addresses (longitude-lattitude) of places ?
3- Does foursquare have any general descriptive summaries of each place?
Thanks for the help.
Chris
Foursquare has an API, more information can be found at this link
To answer your questions:
Yes, check out the Venues Platform in 4sq API, specifically, the search. When you query the API, as part of the result set for each venue, you get a category
If available, you will get them back under the 'contact' field, check out the response venue object from the search function
Yes, description field, you will need to make an API request to get the complete venue object.
Edit: one last thing, attribute and play nice :)
From my experience, you do not get a lot of venues with 'contact' and 'description' information. But foursquare is not very popular where I test my application, so it might be bad experience - experiment with it yourself.
FourSquare has a great category tree that you can use for categorizing restaurants
http://aboutfoursquare.com/foursquare-categories/
Actually, I'm using this tree in my website:
Dishes Map