Monthly Archives: April 2013

First book review : Aptana Studio Beginner's guide

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This came to me as a surprise that I have been asked to review a book and write something about it. I started of with excitement as to finish the book as soon as possible and write something about it. So here it goes.
The book : Aptana Studio Beginner’s Guide
A nice book, as it states from its title. Which is unlikely, is its not only for “beginners only”. This is all you need to get started with Aptana studio but in general Eclipse IDE of any kind.
Aptana Studio itself provides a very solid IDE which is both free and opensource. I love this IDE as I do HTML and JS projects with this IDE. The most appealing thing about this IDE is its cross-platform, so one IDE, one experience everywhere. I must say its a must have for anyone who is serious about Javascript development in general.
Now to get the most out of this nice IDE, this companion book is a must have I would say to get you started and to know what can you do with the IDE.
This book starts with very basic things as to menus and workspace and then move on to deeper topics as to configure it to suite your working style. After working with this IDE for such a long time, I found this book reveals a lot more which came as surprise to me. Things like saving your own customised look and preferences, making shortcuts, the command-line interface inside the IDE and lot more are covered in detail, from a beginner’s perspective.

All in all a nice book to have if you want to get used to Aptana IDE in particular or Eclipse IDE in general.

Thanks a lot to Kenny Dias from Packt Publishing, who gave me this opportunity to review this book.

Settings Check for Apple Push Notification

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While developing an iOS application with Push Notification, there might be a time, one comes across the following error message.

- no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application

Well, that means the APN (Apple Push Notification) server is denying to register your application. This situation arises when the signing certificate for the application differs from the one you generated for Push Notification.

The fix is to select the proper certificate in the settings for the project.
codeSigningCert

Happy coding.

Cordova (Phonegap) , alert message.

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This might seem, very easy task. But then while making a customisable alert message, one need to think as to how to do it. While working on Cordova(phonegap), one can easily assume and which is true is the javascript alert script.

alert("Hello!");

The javascript alert will work. Then we do not have a customisation option except for the message. The solution Cordova provides is a function with the name as alert. The syntax is as below.

navigator.notification.alert(message, alertCallback, [title], [buttonName]);

In the very basic form, where one need to have a specific title, message and button name, the code I use is

navigator.notification.alert("My message", undefined,"My Alert", "ok");

Thats the simplest kind and if one need more generic, wrap the whole thing inside one of your own custom function as example below.

function showAlertWithTitle(title,message){
	navigator.notification.alert(message, undefined,title, "ok");
}

Hope coding.

iOS notifications from developer's view

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Notifications in iOS devices such as iPhone and iPad are a way to tell the user about some important thing has happened. From a users perspective it is just a message reminding thing.
For a developer, one must note the difference between the type of notifications. Well, to be at its simplest form, there re two kinds of notifications. One is local notification and one is push notification (think this as server is telling the iOS device to show the notification).
Well, why should I bother about these two as a developer ?! That might be the question if you are doing the notification programming in iOS for the first time. The answer is, iOS gives very certain instructions as to what and how to do the notification implementation.
Here is the official link to the Apple documentation.

There are only three types of UX for either of the notification (local or push). They are
1. Displaying an alert message
2. Badge the application icon
3. Play a sound

The settings to control these notification types are located in the global settings menu of iOS. Remember it, the settings of all the applications, which use notifications are at one place in all iOS devices and that is the “settings” menu.
Well, another subtle but important option is “notification center”. Its the place, where all the notifications from all the applications reside. The settings, whether to keep the “notification” in “notification center” or not is also inside the global “settings” menu. Being a developer, the good thing about Apple and for that matter the iOS is, one does not code for adding settings item for notifications. It is done automatically for you by the OS (Operating System). All this magic happens, when you as a developer, makes a “certificate” for the application in Apple developer’s portal for the application saying “this application used notification”. Simple and elegant.

The major difference from developer’s point, between local notification and push notification is local notification is scheduled. That means, we can not show a notification if certain things happen in the application. Once application goes to background, we lost power as a developer to do anything at all with that application. So local notifications can only be scheduled for a normal application (for music streaming applications we do get a little more control). If at all we have to notify the user on certain data change, we have to fall back to push notifications. This one is pushed by Apple Push Notification server. Though, there are third party services which can push data, but all of the data push to an users device route through Apple Push Notification server.
The last thing to note is Push notifications are created on the server and pushed to the device, at max, upon tapping the notification, the underlying application can be brought to foreground and thats all one can do as a developer.

Tips for phonegap developers :
1. There are two different official plugins (one for local and one push notification), but then these plugins are not always up to date or might not support your version of the phonegap(cordova), do some reading before you settle down with the plugins.
2. The third party service providers (for push notification) might have their own plugins (a lot of do have), its better to use their plugins if you are developing upon their infrastructure.

Tip for push notification :
Make sure you are creating proper certificate with “push notification service” enabled at “Apple developer portal” and then using a profile on XCode which uses that certificate.

Some push notification servers are
1. http://www.pushwoosh.com
2. http://www.xtify.com
3. https://pushwizard.com

Would like to know if anything I am missing here, I am putting things here as I am doing hands-on with this iOS “notifications” for the first time.