I want to leverage AI and Machine learning and develop a mobile app in iOS. I plan to start with clothes but branch into other verticals as well (tools, appliances, etc.). The goal is to blend the in-store experience with mobile commerce, on a personal level (e.g. integrated retail). The app will come prepared with recommendations from the start, but should also continue to learn based on customer preferences as they shop with the app. I need to figure out how to tie this in with Major retailer's APIs as well.
Is something like this possible using CoreML? Or is CoreML something that is local to the device and I would need something that is cloud based so I can tie in with Major retailer APIs?
I believe IBM Watson can address your problem the best. It allows to establish a pipeline where device will upload new data to the cloud and updated models will be pushed back to the device. See https://developer.apple.com/ibm/
I tried their SDK, it works pretty straightforward. I had a problem using UK node of Watson, so I had to switch to US node - and it worked perfectly.
Related
Apologies if this has been answered in some way shape or form many times before - I am new to this area.
If you are familiar with iBeacons, you are probably familiar with the concept of proximity marketing; iBeacons broadcast their signals, the users app picks up on this signal and does something accordingly. My question is how does the app know what to do, does it communicate with a server?
The field of 'proximity marketing' hosts many different online platforms that allow app owners to add their beacons and manage dynamic marketing campaigns - meaning this 'content' is accumulated by the app through communication of some sort.
Example: https://beaconcontrol.io/
BeaconControl (open source proximity marketing platform) quotes this on their website:-
"It's Open Source. Built with Ruby On Rails. Customizable Ruby Engines (plug-in support). MySQL and PostgreSQL support. Uses Redis for backend tasks. REST JSON API. Hosted on GitHub. Deployable with Capistrano to your own server. Deployable to heroku."
If someone could set me off in the right direction that would be great!
Thanks and regards,
Olly
iBeacon devices transmit their own unique identification number to the nearby area. A specific app on a mobile device is continiously looking up (sniffing) for iBeacon frames and parses unique identification numbers (UUID, Major, Minor values) from the captured devices. Then the app sends this identification number to the dedicated server and based on this numbers, it triggers some action on the mobile device, such as an auto check-in, or delivery of a push notification, etc.
I recently have been very interested in developing iOS apps (for iPhone specifically) that can "communicate" with nearby (geographically) apps.
My networking skills/resources are limited, so I was really hoping to make it a peer to peer app, avoiding the need to host my own server.
It seems like I have a few options, including the newish Multi-peer Connectivity framework, and Location services.
I was hoping someone who has experience writing peer to peer apps could direct me to what they think the most logical approach would be.
Additonal info:
*I am only looking to send text/small pictures (speed is not a priority)
*Detecting nearby (within a mile or so) geographically is the main goal
*Possibly communicate with Android devices (I know multi-peer connectivity lacks this)
Peer-to-peer communication is limited to a range of about 50 meters. To extend the range you can create a mesh using intermediate peers to relay messages. That is how the Firechat app works.
If you want to communicate over greater distances without a mesh I believe you will need to go via the cloud
In terms of communicating with Android, the people who made FireChat are coming out with their SDK. Not sure how/what pricing will be but I assume they will offer this cross platform function. There are of course other ways but I am not that advanced in app development to know them yet.
For a simple chat app there are many free online tutorials that help you create iphone to iphone chat app that can also send images. Range will be limited however to whatever is max for WiFi. Like Keith said, mesh is another option but I believe everyone in the network has to have the app for the data to bounce.
Building a multi player iOS game where players compete one against the other. Nature of the game is synchronous. Basically, players either invite each other through facebook, email, etc and then start playing.
We debate what is the best strategy for facilitating the real time communication between players (sending events, etc). Coming from web development, we used comet and long polling which worked great. However, it's not clear what's the best way to achieve that on iOS.
Seems like APN (Apple Push Notifications) is not suitable in our case for two reasons: the delay can be pretty significant, up to few seconds, as far as we understand. Also, using APN requires the user to authorize notifications. If the user doesn't authorize this then it won't be possible to play the game.
Also, we understand Apple's Game Kit (Game Center) can be of value in our case however it's not clear how it interacts with invites through facebook etc. Also, not clear if we need to get into bed with Apple's Game Center and how it'll affect the user experience.
Any guidance on this matter as well as other options that you might think of would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your help.
Before you read the rest, a disclaimer: I work for Realtime.co but I do believe I can help here so I'm not trying to "pitch a sale".
If you need to have real time updates, you can check out Realtime (www.realtime.co). It's basically a set of tools for developers to use real time technologies on their projects. It uses websockets but does fallback to whatever the user's browser supports (such as long polling, for example) if you are using a browser (which is not your case, but it's always good to know).
Behind Realtime you have a one-to-one/one-to-many/many-to-many messaging system that will transport your messages to and from your users.
There's a iOS API too which you can use in your project. You can download it here: http://www.xrtml.org/downloads_62.html#ios and check the documentation here: http://docs.xrtml.org/getting_started/hello_message.html#ios.
There's also a plus which is the fact that the Realtime framework is actually cross-platform. This means that you can even have your iOS players to communicate with players using Android, Windows Phone, HTML5, Flash, etc. if you decide on expanding your game to other platforms.
I hope that helps!
I'll just provide some insights on the question.
APN should never be used for synchro communication as for iOS at least, you'll never have both way communication (basically the Apple APN servers are pushing an information to the device).
You should probably play with C sockets in order to open a tunnel (depends if your game is real time or not).
Using the Apple Framework GameKit is great! But might take some time to understand all the functionnalities.
Check out Gree
https://developer.gree.net/en/
Parse:
https://www.parse.com/
Sparrow:
http://gamua.com/sparrow/
There are a few things that your talking about, there is the joining/starting of a game, and then the communication between the players. They are not necessarily related.
You can use game-center and at the same time another framework for facebook, they are not mutually exclusive (but it would be more work.)
I’m building my 2nd game now and I’m wondering if there’s an iOS API to help me out with building a social async game. I’ve used GameCenter before (for leaderboards) but I don’t think GameCenter is something I can use for this.
Are there any open source components I can use instead? Something like the Facebook SDK?
Would I need to have the game run on a server?
You could actually use GameCenter for some of the things you wish to build. For instance, there’s a built-in mechanism for matchmaking and turn based style games. You can have a look at GKTurnBasedMatch for more information.
However, GameCenter does have its limitations. There’s a great blog post by Andrew Plotkin that describes his experience with building a GameCenter based turn-based game. In short, using GameCenter is a bit convulted, one of the players in the match needs to constantly maintain the game state (since it’s all client based) and there is no possible way for both players to act simultaneously. Also, there are issues with players logging out of games (Apple doesn’t provide a mechanism for forfeiting the game or skipping someone’s turn).
You could always take the long road and implement the game using your own server. You would need to build several mechanisms like registration, matchmaking, push notification integration, storage and of course client to server communications.
Another option to consider would be to use Nextpeer’s SDK. They provide a complete solution for games that wish to incorporate a “play with friends” feature and it’s free. They take care of the matchmaking, push notifications and all server-side logic. The game itself just needs to implement some simple methods like starting a game, reporting score and ending a game. It’s pretty easy, they have a simple screencast here that shows how to do it.
I want to get to know how I can transfer data easily between 2 iPhones, over wifi. I would like to know if I could do that without having a server or database, but within an app (so without using email).
Game Kit has support for Peer-to-Peer-Connectivity and is, despite the name, not only usable for games:
The GKSession class allows your application to create and manage an
ad-hoc Bluetooth or local wireless network, as shown in Figure 1.
Copies of your application running on multiple devices can discover
each other and exchange information, providing a simple and powerful
way to create multiplayer games on iOS. Further, sessions offer all
applications an exciting mechanism to allow users to collaborate with
each other.
You can also check out Bonjour API from Apple. I am not sure if you need a static IP for it to work or it can just work over wifi. Just trying to give a pointer.
Based on your exact usecase, it can work well.
Check it out here, Game center is also there.
http://developer.apple.com/technologies/ios/networking.html