This is a problem that every developer will face when building their apps: how to contact the reviewer of your app to notify them of an update, new release, help topics, etc?
Some things I am thinking:
Include an RSS feed in your app which you can update to notify the users of the app.
Include a twitter feed regarding your app. How to go about this?
Include a way for the users to subscribe to a mailing list. This way, I can send a mass-email to the users who opted-in? Any suggestions here?
Any other ways that you think this can/should be done? Any existing solutions you can point me to will be great. Thanks in advance.
One way, for contacting a specific user who created a review of an application is to go to Zune Social (at http://social.zune.net/home) and create a new message. You can then enter the Zune Tag of the user who created a review.
Personally, I'd try to do all three - have a web page/site, with an RSS feed, and a subscription link (so they can subscribe to the RSS feed via email) and then post any updates to your twitter account as well.
You can't really force a user to do any of these, but having the options available, and linked from inside your app on the about page is probably good practise.
You could also include some kind of "Update Available" feature inside the application. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible obviously. Obviously if they've still got the app installed they'll get an update notification from the marketplace anyway.
Sam
Besides the suggestions made by samjudson, I'll also recommend having a support-page with a direct option to send a email to you. Here's a example of a support-page from one of my applications. I've received lot of emails with suggestions for improvements, or complains about bugs. And since it's by email, it gives you the option to respond directly to people.
Another thing about reviews. Don't take them to serious. Most people only rate negatively (since humans like to complain), and by such a lot of reviews are often misinformed, outdated, or the users just been plain ignorant.
Related
I dont know where to begin. Do I need to create an app? Do I need to use bots? I have tried finding docs online but don't know where to start. Any help with be appreciated.
I am trying to create a small form in a teams channel that my users will fill out.
User enters #projects
Web server responds with
User clicks submit and data gets posted to my web server.
You're correct that there are a few different kinds of applications in Teams, so finding the one that suits your needs can be a little confusing at first. For what you're trying to do, I would recommend a Bot, and when it received a message (which it will do when it receives your #mention), it can respond with an Adaptive Cards. Adaptive Cards, if you've not used them, are like small embedded forms inside the chat. The user can complete the card and click a button, and it will send the payload back to your bot to do whatever it needs.
Bots, incidentally, are basically just web services, so your bot can do whatever it needs once it received the payload, such as calling another API in turn.
You haven't mentioned what language you might want to work in, but here are some good starting point nevertheless:
https://dev.botframework.com/
https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples
https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples/csharp_dotnetcore/57.teams-conversation-bot (I've linked the C# version - you should know that Teams bots use the same Microsoft framework as -all- bots build for the Microsoft world, such as web chat bot or a Skype bot. As a result, you have to ensure that anything you look at is applicable to Teams as some content/samples are not)
https://adaptivecards.io/ (as with Bots, Adaptive Cards have a life outside of Teams, so some articles/content/etc. might not be applicable to your scenario)
In particular I'm interested in the possibility of getting an App Access Token with no expiration time, exactly as I do with Facebook.
I want to publish on behalf of the user via server, and I found very useful and convenient the Facebook's procedure in which we ask for the user permissions only the first time.
I have been working with this kind of social-networks interaction for merely three weeks, so I will be very happy to hear any type of suggestions or critics.
Google+ does not currently have a public write API. There are selected partners that they work with (such as HootSuite) that provide this feature, but they are making access to it available very slowly. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/pages-signup for further details.
Google+ does have a concept of Moments, which are activities that happen in your app that are reported to Google+ and which the user may later wish to share, or may make available to people in their circles on a limited non-notification basis. This is probably not what you want, but may serve some needs. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/moments for more info and examples how to use it.
Simply, No there is no way to do that in Google+ in current time. In general, apps for Google plus is read only.
Does anyone know how to access Contacts in Windows 8 Store apps?
I know that because of the sandboxed nature, Windows Store apps cannot access AddressBook from files such as Outlook Express contacts or Outlook, but since there is already an app called People that comes pre-installed, I figure why not let users make use of whatever Contacts the user has already allowed the app to see, rather than creating separate list of Contacts for my app. It seems silly to recreate the wheel by asking the user to re-import all the contacts again.
I have seen Contact Picker example but I still have no clues how to get list of Contacts/People as in that People app.
I have not developed for mobile phone, however if the device is a mobile phone, surely the app is expected to use local contacts rather than keeping separate list of contacts. So I am thinking there's got to be a way to do the same thing on a PC or any device really, rather than each app managing its own contacts. I have not seen any guidance on how to do this. What are your thoughts?
I asked a similar question a few days ago and, after a lot of research, it looks like it's just not possible to get that information from the people app outside of the contract. The reason that it works within calendar/mail/messenger is because they're all technically contained within the same app and are able to use each other's data and violate normal rules.
A lot of people have pointed me to look at the live SDK, but it still seems like it's not at all possible to get people information in your app, since the SDK doesn't support it anymore.
Look at the ContactPicker class :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br224913.aspx
Another way is to share your resource or whatever you want to send and user will choose an app that will send or on any another way use your shared resource (url, image, whatever)
IMO the latter is preferred way since then user will have a choice of applications that can send mail or post that resource on facebook / twitter.
Check this sample on ContactPicker
My school is using a website to manage grades, homework and communication with teachers. Because there is no way to get automatic notification, most students have to use it daily to check manually if there's an update (new message, new grade, etc). Since their service has no API, what should I do to get automatic notifications.
Is there any tools available that automatically notify you (by email or rss feed) of any change in a page by authentifying and checking if the value of a specific field changed?
Should I code my own script?
Is there any tool or library out there that could make this task easier?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
https://www.changedetection.com/
Not sure if it works for secure websites, though.
I just found something interesting. It's called Scrapy. It's an application framework that makes data-mining and structured data extraction easier.
Has anyone experience with Scrapy? Could it solve my problem?
Namely, does the Facebook API make this possible? I'd like to leave my news feed intact, but remove posts that meet some criteria for things I don't want to see (e.g., don't show me anything that sounds like Dick Cheney might have said it). Does the Facebook API allow apps to customize a user's normal news feed? I spent a few minutes looking at the facebook developer pages, but didn't see any direct answers to my question, so I was hoping some developers who were experienced with Facebook's API could help me here.
Before anyone mentions it, I don't want to just hide updates from those users. They may post other updates that I want to see, so I'd prefer to filter out updates based on content.
There is a Greasemonkey script called "Facebook Purity" which does this. You could probably look at the source and alter it to your specifications.
You could parse the news feed into a database on your site then use code to parse whether or not to display it.
yes this is possible but only if all your friends decide to add your application! otherwise you may be not able to access their feeds.
Its been a while since i used Facebook SDK so this may have changed.
The API provides very little news feed integration, and no you can't use the api to prevent news feed items from showing up in a users feed. All you can do is post and get, and you can only post 10 items a day, "significant" interactions. The Facebook API wasn't designed to enhance or alter the core Facebook experience, it was designed to allow developers to create third party apps that add to Facebook within a very limited and tightly controlled sandbox.
The Linq to facebook project looks quite interesting and may allow you to do what you are asking (if using .NET 3.5). My apologies for a link to such a pink website ;-)