Which part of iOS file system can I access? - ios

I'm totally new to iOS development and was playing around with some ideas to learn the ropes. One thing I am trying to do requires me to run through the device file system in order to e.g. show info on file type occurrence (basic storage analytics so to say) etc. Or only access local text files (like emails) to analyse them.
After doing some research it seems to me that the system is pretty restricted. Is it possible to access files directly or ask the user for permission to do so?
Any direct help, hint or link would be much appreciated! :)

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How to find the eVar Names in Adobe Workspace or Analytics

I am wondering that how to find the eVar names that are already implemented in the Adobe analytics.
Please let me know how to find in the bulk of all implemented eVars that will help me better understand user flows and build the charts efficiently.
There are a few ways to get bulk settings info. The most comprehensive is the Adobe Health Dashboard- https://express.adobe.com/page/tnNQGNlfzta3b/. Thisnot only tells you what each variable is named and what its settings are, but also shows you what type of data it is receiving. The downside is it requires adobe.io authorization, which can be a pain to get set up. It also only runs on PCs (because of its excel macros). I believe it also really only shows one report suite at a time.
You can also use tools like https://reportsuites.com/ to just get an export of variables and their settings.... it's particularly useful if you want ot compare across report suites. The main downside there is that adobe has made it hard to find the web services API credentials you need in order to run it.

Share Files between Apps on the same iPad (Without iCloud)

I have two iPad apps, one which downloads data from a server and stores it on the iPad and another one (the main app) which uses the data later.
(It would make sense to combine the two but it's a client requirement)
But I see no way to share the data between the two apps.
I have heard there are ways to do it using:
Custom URL Schemes
Document Support on iPad Devices
UIPasteboard
But I cannot find any thing explaining how to use any of these effectively.
Can anyone point me in the right direction.
Just to clarify:
It is an iPad only app
Both apps will not run at the same time
Basically I need to access the documents or caches folder of one app from another
Using iCloud or any other third part service is not possible
It would be great if I could make the downloader app into a sort of configuration page for the main app (if it is even possible)
So keeping these in mind which one would be the most suitable?
This link at github may be useful... Looks like someone has already made a file manager, using these elements you may be able to do what you are looking for. But as far as I know, your app is extremely sandboxed and does not really interact with other apps/the file system very much at all (Apple is very limiting that way)
EDIT
this post seems to have the explanations of local data sharing methods you were looking for. None of the methods in this post requires any connectivity, just a device and 2 apps :) Good luck!

iOS: Is there a way to delete specific files securely from the file system?

I am writing an application for iOS and a requirement I have been given is to remove files securely from the file system that may be given to my app from other applications (think 'Open in...'). These files are placed in a temp folder accessible to my app, but I'd like to securely delete these files once I have encrypted them in my own documents folder via the standard protection APIs. Any idea how to do that?
Quotes from the paper linked to by Bavarious:
We found that none of the available software techniques for sanitizing individual files were effective.
Overall, we conclude that the increased complexity of SSDs relative to hard drives requires that SSDs provide verifiable sanitization operations.
I'm not sure the flash memory in iPhones supports these operations, but if they do I'm pretty sure that Apple will have to make them available through their API and I haven't found anything in the API for this.
So basically it doesn't seem to be possible. Perhaps you could file a bug report with Apple and ask them to fix something like this.
I think you're better of looking into the possibility to encrypt the file before saving it.

Any good (free) text-to-speech engines out there?

I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.

Is there a way to read a browser's history, using Adobe AIR or any other tool?

First of all, I'm not a hacker :)
We're doing a project where we'll award points to users for visiting certain groups of sites.
Obviously there are major privacy concerns, but we have no interest in actually knowing where they've been, just as long as the program we create can check the history and through an algorithm, rank the site/user.
This would be a downloadable application and we'd tell the user how it worked, since transparency is vital.
Now, with that in mind, is there a way for a local program to access the Cache/History of a browser and make a list out of it?
I've read that Firefox uses SQLite to compile their History, which could potentially be parsed using Adobe AIR.
At the same time, Adobe AIR has access to the filesystem, so it could probably check if the usual IE temporary folders have any files stored. If so, try to read the URL they were downloaded from?
I know all of this sounds very dodgy, but try to keep an open mind :)
Thank you all for your help.
Not a full answer to your question, but you might be interested in the CSS History hack. If you already KNOW the sites you want to rank, you will be able to find out which sites the users visited.
Good thing you said something about a LOCAL program, because there are surely ways to read out the SQLite database from Mozilla and IE's history and you can find plenty of implementations using your favorite search engine.
Particularly easy to use are Nirsoft's utilities MozillaHistoryView and IEHistoryView which you could script to output CSV and parse that file afterwards.

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