Blog Archives
Deal Wizard Released for iOS
We are glad to announce that starting from today, Deal Wizard is now available in the Apple app store. Deal Wizard is a personal deal aggregator that aggregates thousands of deals and then sort them out according to the user’s profile. Deal Wizard is available for download from the following link.
Price Rhythm
Shop Smarter.
New Versions for iOS and Android
With the start of the new year, we are glad to announce the release of two new versions of our Personal Shopping Advisor (Price Rhythm). The changes for version 2.1 for iOS includes the following changes:
- We integrated a new auto suggestion support to our search. The auto suggestions will let you find the products you want in a faster and easier manner.
- We added a search history to allow quick access for old searches.
- We also updated the user interface for the prices and deal pages.
The changes for version 2.2 for Android are:
- We integrated an auto suggestion support for the search functionality.
- We fixed the bug that caused devices with only front camera to crash sometimes when trying to scan a barcode.
- We added the ability to manage personal notes on specific products.
- We improved our local stores accuracy.
- We improved the main menu UI for devices with big screens (Tablets).
As always we appreciate your feedback.
Price Rhythm
Personal Shopping Advisor.
Opening a Facebook page on iOS
One of the last features that we’ve added in our iOS version was a link to our Facebook page. While developing this feature, we had encountered a little problem.
When you are trying to open a Facebook link on a device that has Facebook app installed on it using the following command :
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.facebook.com/[YOUR_PAGE]“]]
you will end up opening the Facebook app when it displays the last page you accessed and not the requested page.
So how can this be solved?
The solution is that you have to change the Facebook url, instead of including [YOUR_PAGE] name in the link, you have to include your page id. In order to get [YOUR_PAGE] id, you should run the following url:
https://graph.facebook.com/[YOUR_PAGE]
By running this url you will get the following JSON answer:
{
…
“id”: “XXX”,
…
}
After extracting the “id” field from the JSON, you can now create the final URL and forward the user to it:
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.facebook.com/[id]“]]
By the way, from what I checked, this feature is not IOS version dependent, I’ve tested it on IOS 5 and IOS 6. Also you don’t have to open it as openUrl:, you may also use UIWebView in order to complete this action.
Jane V
Chief App Developer
Price Rhythm
Version 2.0 Now Available For iOS
We are glad to announce that our new version for iOS (iPhone/iPod touch) is now available on the iTunes store. The new version includes the following changes:
1. Improving product local stores mechanism
2. Adding full product specifications
3. Allowing the user to set up shopping profile for better shopping recommendations
4. Now the user can add personal notes/thoughts about products.
5. Performance improvement
6. Support for the IPhone5 screen
As usual we welcome your feedback and invite you to shop a little smarter.
Price Rhythm
Personal Shopping Advisor
Price Rhythm Is Now Available For iPhone
We are glad to announce that starting from today, Price Rhythm is now available for iOS 5. After months of hard work, long nights, hard days of debugging, our app had finally reached the coasts of the iTunes store. The app is available for free (of course) and includes all the cool features (such as recommendations, reviews, pro & cons, price comparisons and much more) that you got used to in our previous versions for Android and Windows Phone 7.
The app is available at the following link.
We hope that you will enjoy it, and as always we invite you to write us feedback and comments.
Attached are screenshots of the iOS Version:
Price Rhythm.
Personal Shopping Advisor.
Shop a bit smarter.
iOS Back Button Events
Well, I was struggling with this for a couple of days, and decided to share it.
We are developing an iphone version for our application and during the development I came up with the following problem.
We have a UINavigationController in our app that is responsible for managing the navigations.
In the navigationController we have a customized back button:
navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle:@”back” style:UIBarButtonItemStylePlain target:nil action:nil];
The problem with this button is that although it lets you define target and action for your logic in case of click, it is not calling them. This behavior is also explained in the apple documentation, but no solution is given to the problem.
So at this point if you want to add your logic when back button is pressed you may find yourself doing the following and reinventing the wheel:
- Implementing the back button by yourself
- Struggling with UINavigationControllerDelegate
- Subclassing the UINavigationController, when you really are not advised to do this according to https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/Reference/UINavigationController_Class/Reference/Reference.html
However, there is a really simple solution that can be used:
If we are trying to simplify the problem, this is the scenario:
- Back button is pressed
- viewWillDisappear is called
So, we can insert our code in viewWillDisappear method. But (since we always have a but) this method can also be called when there is a new view that is pushed in the stack above our view, which makes it disappear.
How can we check this? Actually it is really simple 
In the View Controller programming guide [https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS/RespondingtoDisplay-Notifications/RespondingtoDisplay-Notifications.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007457-CH12-SW1] you can find out in which state the viewWillDisappear method is called, if it is by calling the back button so it returns to the parent controller or the new controller is pushed above.
The code should look like this:
- (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated
{
[super viewWillDisappear:animated];
// Checking if we are disappearing because of the back button
if ([self isMovingFromParentViewController])
{
// In case that back button is pressed, insert your code here
}
}
Jane V
Chief App Developer
Price Rhythm
